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Author: tio

  • International Women’s Day 2026: Championing women in cancer research

  • Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)

    Today’s links


    An anatomical drawing of a cross-section of a man's head. The eyeball has been replaced by an RSS logo. To the left of the face is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movie. To the right are clouds of grey roiling clouds, infiltrating the brain as well.

    The web is bearable with RSS (permalink)

    Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn’t downstream of the “iron laws of economics” or an unrealistic demand by “consumers” to get stuff for free.

    Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

    Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish “feeds” of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.

    RSS is simple and versatile. It’s the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It’s how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it’s a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.

    RSS’s liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called “Google Reader” in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google’s product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.

    But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I’ve always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google’s desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers’ bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).

    Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google’s Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples’ companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.

    Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google’s shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a “mature” company.

    Google needed a new growth story, and “Google will conquer Facebook’s market” was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn’t have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook’s income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers’ bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+’s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.

    Of course, tying individual executives’ bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart’s law has it, “Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric.” As soon as key decision-makers’ personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today – think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google’s products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

    Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google’s scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader’s core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they’d bet the company on.

    If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook – and G+ died shortly thereafter.

    For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It’s a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:

    https://kottke.org/rolodex/

    There are many good RSS readers. I’ve been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:

    https://newsblur.com/

    But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and – crucially – make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:

    https://www.carolinecrampton.com/the-view-from-rss/

    As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.

    It’s almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or “keep reading” links.

    Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites – even ones like Wired and The Intercept – as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.

    Firefox has a built-in “Reader View” that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-reader-view/

    Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you’re running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you’ll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.

    Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can’t figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you’re stuck reading the page in the site’s own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don’t want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install “Kill Sticky,” a bookmarklet that reaches into the page’s layout files and deletes any element that isn’t designed to scroll with the rest of the text:

    https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

    Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the “Javascript Toggle On and Off” plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren’t allowed to run any scripts:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/

    Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the “Element Blocker” plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/element-blocker/

    It’s ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There’s corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta’s monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter’s crushing of the open web. There’s regulatory enshittification, like the EU’s failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of “cookie consent” popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.

    Those are real problems, but they don’t have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

    Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites – even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox – remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple’s ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

    And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.

    The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to “just work,” without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable – and foreseen – consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn’t mandatory is prohibited:

    https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #25yrsago 200 Eyemodule photos from Disneyland https://craphound.com/030401/

    #20yrsago Fourth Amendment luggage tape https://ideas.4brad.com/node/367

    #15yrsago Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs https://web.archive.org/web/20110216081007/http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/

    #15yrsago 20 lies from Scott Walker https://web.archive.org/web/20110308062319/https://filterednews.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/20-lies-and-counting-told-by-gov-walker/

    #10yrsago The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20160415000000*/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

    #10yrsago Hacking a phone’s fingerprint sensor in 15 mins with $500 worth of inkjet printer and conductive ink https://web.archive.org/web/20160306194138/http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Fingerprint/CaoJain_HackingMobilePhonesUsing2DPrintedFingerprint_MSU-CSE-16-2.pdf

    #10yrsago Despite media consensus, Bernie Sanders is raising more money, from more people, than any candidate, ever https://web.archive.org/web/20160306110848/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-keeps-raising-money–and-spending-it-a-potential-problem-for-clinton/2016/03/05/a8d6d43c-e2eb-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

    #10yrsago Calculating US police killings using methodologies from war-crimes trials https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/

    #1yrago Brother makes a demon-haunted printer https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/#show-me-the-incentives-i-will-show-you-the-outcome

    #1yrago Two weak spots in Big Tech economics https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1012 words today, 45361 total)

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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  • New Footage Shows Wanted Kinahan Cartel Kingpins Post-Sanctions

    New Footage Shows Wanted Kinahan Cartel Kingpins Post-Sanctions

    This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here.

    Daniel and Christy Kinahan at a Dubai sports arena last June. Source: WeCaptureYou, TrillerTV

    Kinahan cartel leaders Daniel and Christy Kinahan have been photographed in Dubai, marking the most recent sighting of the wanted crime bosses since the US government put multi-million dollar bounties on their heads.

    The footage was captured just weeks after Kinahan cartel lieutenant Sean McGovern was extradited from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Ireland, where he was charged with murder and directing the activities of a criminal organisation.

    Filmed during a mixed martial arts (MMA) event in June, the images are the first visual proof that the drug cartel’s leadership — who fled from Spain to Dubai in 2016 — were still in hiding in the desert city as recently as last summer.

    Wanted posters for Irish drugs smugglers Daniel, Christy and Christopher Kinahan Jr. Sanctions were imposed on the Kinahan cartel in 2022, prohibiting financial institutions and businesses from dealing with the family, their associates and companies. Source: US Department of the Treasury

    Christy Kinahan, 68, and his two sons, Daniel, 48, and Christopher Jr, 45 — the most senior members of the Kinahan Organised Crime Group — are wanted by authorities around the world. The three Irishmen have been sanctioned by the US government and are the subject of a collective $15 million reward for information leading to their arrest.

    Bellingcat and The Sunday Times have previously revealed how Christy Kinahan left a trail of Google reviews exposing his movements and travel partners over a five year period. We also uncovered the gang’s links to a German businessman charged with trafficking cocaine in 2024, and to an Australian pilot who was killed during a failed drug run in South America last year.

    “Google Gangster” Christy Kinahan has posted hundreds of reviews online, rating everything from luxury hotels to a Covid-19 test centre.

    Bellingcat discovered this new footage of the narco-traffickers after running a photo posted to social media of one of Daniel Kinahan’s adult sons — whose name was published last year — through face recognition search engine PimEyes.

    It returned a professional photograph of Daniel Kinahan that was taken during the 971 Fighting Championship (971 FC) at the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai’s City Walk district on June 14, 2025.

    Pictured wearing a black top, baseball cap and glasses, he is sitting ringside next to the event’s founder and former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) athlete, Mounir “The Sniper” Lazzez.

    Daniel Kinahan (left) watches a fight with Mounir Lazzez at the 971 FC in Dubai last year (image cropped by Bellingcat). Lazzez has been an outspoken supporter of Kinahan. Source: WeCaptureYou

    (The image, which had been posted to a Dubai photography company’s website, was removed yesterday, hours after Bellingcat contacted a representative for the Kinahans to seek comment.)

    A frame-by-frame sweep of official footage and user-generated content from the arena revealed that Christy Kinahan, the founder of the eponymous drug cartel, was also among the reported 6,000 spectators at the fight night.

    Left: The shot of Christy Kinahan discovered by Bellingcat in a YouTube clip posted by event organiser 971 FC (edits applied by Bellingcat in Adobe Lightroom: image has been sharpened, and contrast, exposure and clarity increased). Right: A full-length shot of Kinahan, visible in the footage live-streamed to TrillerTV.

    The elusive crime boss — nicknamed “The Dapper Don” — is seen wearing a Panama hat, blue Polo shirt, white trousers and blue trainers.

    These images of the cartel leaders are the first to emerge since Bellingcat published the most recent known photograph of Christopher Kinahan Jr in 2024, captured during a meeting with his father in a Dubai restaurant the year before.

    Christopher Kinahan Jr and his father Christy Kinahan, seen in the background of a photo posted to a Dubai restaurant’s social media, in 2023. The Kinahans fled from their base on Spain’s Costa Del Sol to Dubai in late 2016, in the wake of a deadly feud with the rival Hutch gang.

    The new footage of Daniel Kinahan marks the first time he has been pictured since the US government levied sanctions on the transnational organised crime group in April 2022.

    The Man in the Panama Hat

    The Kinahan cartel is one the world’s most notorious criminal organisations. Worth an estimated €1.5 billion, it is involved in drug trafficking, arms smuggling and money laundering operations around the world. Investigators have also linked the gang to Iran’s intelligence services and the Lebanon-based Islamic militant group Hezbollah.

    It was reportedly part of a “Super Cartel”, a criminal network that controlled much of Europe’s cocaine trade. Five of the network’s key members have been arrested since 2017, but one — Daniel Kinahan — remains at large.

    Daniel Kinahan, who authorities say is responsible for managing the cartel’s vast drug trafficking operations, has been heavily involved in combat sports since the early 2010s. He co-founded MTK Global, a boxing management firm that signed high-profile boxers including former world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.

    Left: Kinahan, who tried to “reinvent” himself as a boxing promoter, with Tyson Fury in Dubai in February 2022. Right: Irish boxer Jono Carroll, pictured with Kinahan at a boxing event at Dubai’s Emirates Golf Club in February 2022, also attended the 971 FC last June. Source: zaidikhan / Instagram, jono_carroll / X

    Kinahan has previously been pictured with boxers and at sporting events, but there have been no confirmed public sightings of him in years. In 2022, after the US sanctions were announced, MTK Global shut down. With multi-million dollar bounties on their heads, the Kinahans fled their luxurious Dubai homes and have kept a low profile since.

    After discovering the photo of Daniel Kinahan from the 971 Fighting Championship, Bellingcat searched for additional footage to verify the gangland figure was in the crowd. Multiple videos confirmed he was in attendance, seated in the stadium’s VIP section.

    Daniel Kinahan, who has no convictions but was named by authorities in the Irish High Court as being in control of the Kinahan gang, was in the front row at the 971 FC. Source: TrillerTV, mustafasaeid / Instagram

    During this process, we also identified a man who strongly resembled his father and the founder of the drugs cartel, Christy Kinahan.

    This man and Daniel Kinahan were seated at opposite ends of the front row, immediately around the eight-sided cage, on white sofas designated for VIPs.

    Top: Composite of screenshots from event footage showing the position of Christy (left) and Daniel Kinahan (right) in the same row during the 971 FC (edits made by Bellingcat). Bottom: Close-ups of the cartel leaders at the event. Exposure and brightness have been increased to enhance visibility. Source: TrillerTV

    We analysed the official footage from the event, a more than six-hour video from sports streaming service TrillerTV. In most of the footage in which the man is visible, his hand partially obscures his face.

    However, it was clear that the man shared many of the physical characteristics of Christy Kinahan, including a similar build, facial features, and hair colour and length. The official live-stream, as well as footage posted to social media, showed his appearance was consistent with that of a man in his late sixties.

    Christy Kinahan at the 971 Fighting Championship in Dubai last June. Source: TrillerTV, anjo50 / YouTube

    The man was also wearing a white Panama hat with blue band, a style the cartel leader has been known to wear.

    In the image below, posted to social media six months before the 971 FC event, a close relative of Christy Kinahan poses with a Panama hat and wrote in the caption that it belonged to him. Bellingcat has not identified this person because they have no known involvement in crime.

    Left: A relative of Kinahan’s said this was his Panama hat in a 2024 social media post. Middle: Kinahan in 2017. Right: Kinahan at court appearance in Belgium, where he was convicted in 2009 on money laundering charges.

    Additionally, the person seated next to the man in the Panama hat throughout the fight night strongly resembled one of Christy Kinahan’s immediate family members. Bellingcat has not identified this person because they have no known involvement in crime.

    Two individuals seated behind the man also closely resembled people that Bellingcat and its publishing partner The Sunday Times have linked to the cartel.

    Top: Screenshots of Kinahan at the Dubai MMA event (Bellingcat increased brightness in image two to enhance visibility). Bottom: Publicly available photos of Kinahan. Source: TrillerTV, YouTube, Vimeo, ICIJ, The Irish Sun

    It was subsequently confirmed that the man in the Panama hat was Christy Kinahan. The Sunday Times confirmed his identity with three sources who either knew the cartel leader personally or have investigated his activities.

    Fight Night, Familiar Faces

    Christy Kinahan has served prison time in Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium but has evaded capture for more than a decade. He has received anti-surveillance training to conceal his identity and avoid drawing attention and, in recent years, used aliases to fly under the radar.

    But Kinahan is visible throughout the entire live-stream of the 971 Fighting Championship — adding up to the longest known footage of the cartel leader that has ever been made public.

    The Sunday Times reports today that his presence at a high profile event that live-streamed online was uncharacteristic for a criminal who has made a career of escaping detection.

    “His appearance in the open, seated in such a public place, is all the more remarkable because it is so likely to draw attention, a stark departure for Kinahan, who typically operates like a ghost,” it said.

    Christy Kinahan was visible at multiple points during the broadcast at Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena (edits and collage made by Bellingcat). Kinahan reportedly lived in the same area as the arena before the US sanctions and posted a picture of the venue in a 2021 Google review. Source: TrillerTV

    Bellingcat’s analysis showed that Christy Kinahan was in his seat at the very beginning of the event, when the VIP area was almost entirely empty, and stayed until the end of the last fight, more than six hours later.

    He was also seen standing, walking and communicating with other people during the fight night. Kinahan was observed talking to 971 FC founder Mounir Lazzez, who sat next to him during the first round of the Junior Karanta vs Oli Thompson bout. At one point, Lazzez tapped Kinahan on the arm.

    L-R: Lazzez is seen in the seat next to Christy Kinahan and tapping Kinahan on the arm. Exposure and brightness have been increased in both screenshots to enhance visibility. Kinahan faces away as Lazzez appears to pose for a photograph. Source: TrillerTV, We Capture You / Vimeo

    Daniel Kinahan appears to have spent less time in the arena, and is first seen in his seat almost four hours into the event. He is captured talking to Lazzez in this photo, taken shortly after Kurdistani fighter Namo Fazil won his bout.

    Daniel Kinahan is not seen again after Irish fighter James Gallagher won his bout an hour later, which is when the professional photo of Kinahan and Lazzez was taken.

    L-R: Daniel Kinahan talking to Lazzez and two other people at the fight night. Exposure and brightness have been increased in the centre screenshot. Source: shirinbayd / Instagram, TrillerTV, mustafasaeid / Instagram

    Tunisian-born Lazzez lives in Dubai, where he is listed as a part-owner of a gym called the 971 MMA & Fitness Academy. He launched the 971 Fighting Championship in 2024, promising to “change the face” of combat sports.

    Footage from the first 971 FC event, at The Agenda arena in Dubai in May 2024, was not clear enough to identify people in the crowd, but social media posts confirm that an immediate relative of Daniel Kinahan’s was present.

    L-R: Mounir Lazzez, who was represented by Daniel Kinahan’s now-defunct sports management company MTK Global, wearing MTK-branded clothing; Posts from 2021 and 2022 in which Lazzez thanks Kinahan for his support and said he has “never met a man like him”. Source: mounirlazzez / Instagram

    Lazzez has publicly backed Daniel Kinahan despite the global law enforcement efforts to apprehend him. In April 2022, days after the sanctions against the cartel were announced, he thanked Kinahan in a post-fight speech and subsequent media interview in Las Vegas. Lazzez has spoken about their relationship on multiple occasions, including describing Kinahan as a “good friend, brother and advisor”.

    Bellingcat contacted Mounir Lazzez by phone, email and social media but did not receive a response.

    The man and woman were just off camera in the professional photo of Daniel Kinahan. Exposure and brightness have been increased to enhance visibility. Source: WeCaptureYou, TrillerTV

    Bellingcat also identified the people sitting on either side of Daniel Kinahan when the professional photograph was taken. They are a man and a woman who were both involved behind the scenes at 971 FC.

    The man, who has previously worked in boxing promotion, had a senior role at the Coca-Cola Arena in June last year, including during the fight night, according to his LinkedIn profile.

    The woman, who lists her most recent employment as an MMA event coordinator, appeared in footage posted to 971 FC’s social media that described her as being part of the production team. She is tagged in multiple posts about the event, including from an MMA fighter who participated on the night. The woman is also seen hugging Daniel Kinahan, talking to his adult son and sitting next to Mounir Lazzez.

    Daniel Kinahan is seen waving to the woman, who then walks over and hugs him. Video has been brightened to enhance visibility. Source: TrillerTV

    This means that Kinahan, once a “major player” in the combat sports business, was surrounded by the 971 FC founder and two people who worked at the event. 

    The man and woman did not respond to Bellingcat’s questions. There is no suggestion they are involved in any criminal activity.

    No clear footage of the younger Kinahan meeting with his father was identified at the 971 FC event. However, during a mid-event performance by American rapper Lloyd Banks, shortly after the professional photo was taken, Daniel Kinahan’s seat was empty and a person wearing similar clothing (light coloured trousers, a dark top and baseball cap) is seen moving along the front row, greeting people, and embracing Christy Kinahan. 

    The identity of this person could not be verified due to the low quality of the footage.

    The movements of a man wearing a baseball cap and clothes similar to Daniel Kinahan during a performance by Lloyd Banks. Exposure and brightness has been altered to enhance visibility. Source: TrillerTV, Instagram

    The Sunday Times reports today that the Kinahans continue to enjoy a VIP lifestyle in Dubai despite the UAE’s insistence that it has taken action against the cartel. “These findings suggest that the imposition of American sanctions has failed to significantly weaken the cartel and may, in fact, have made it more resilient,” it said.

    “The Emiratis claim to have frozen €200 million in assets across UAE-registered businesses and mapped the organisation’s front companies and proxies; however, the Kinahans’ continued ability to operate in the open suggests these enforcement efforts have yet to strike a decisive blow.”

    An extradition treaty between Ireland and the UAE was ratified in 2025, but to date it has only been enforced on Kinahan cartel lieutenant Sean McGovern, who was returned on an Irish military plane last May.

    In December, Detective Chief Superintendent Séamus Boland, the head of Ireland’s drugs and organised crime bureau, said investigations into the Kinahan cartel were ongoing and that he hoped 2026 would be a “significant year”.

    He was speaking ahead of the 10 year anniversary of Dublin’s Regency Hotel attack, when a rival gang attempted to assassinate Daniel Kinahan at a boxing weigh-in. The attack left Kinahan gang member David Byrne dead and sparked a bloody gangland feud that has resulted in 18 deaths.

    Bellingcat contacted a representative for the Kinahans to seek comment but did not receive a response.

    Connor Plunkett, Peter Barth, Beau Donelly and John Mooney contributed to this article.

    Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here, Instagram here, Reddit here and YouTube here. 

    The post New Footage Shows Wanted Kinahan Cartel Kingpins Post-Sanctions appeared first on bellingcat.

  • The Incendiary Bomb Never Seen in Israel Before

    The Incendiary Bomb Never Seen in Israel Before

    The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has dropped 5,000 bombs on Iran since the United States and Israel launched an attack last week, according to a statement by the IAF on March 4.

    Bellingcat has monitored weapons used in the first few days of the war, and strikes across the region, including those that caused civilian harm. Some weapons, such as the US Precision Strike Missile, have seen their first use in combat. A variant of the Tomahawk missile, previously unknown to the public, was also used.

    On March 3, the IAF posted three images in three separate posts showing a bomb not publicly seen in Israeli service before. The Israel Air Force released these photos accompanied with claims they were of jets participating in the strikes on Iran. Experts told Bellingcat that this bomb appears to have an incendiary component, and may be one intended to destroy chemical or biological warfare agents.

    Photo of an Israeli Air Force jet purportedly participating in strikes, equipped with two of these bombs (far left and far right). Source: Israeli Air Force.

    The images appear to show 2,000-pound-class air-delivered bombs fitted with Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit with a red band around the nose. Red is commonly used to denote an incendiary, while yellow indicates high explosive effect.

    Image of a bomb with the body of a MK 84 2,000-pound-bomb, but with a red band near the nose, and a US JDAM guidance kit. The image is cropped by Bellingcat to focus on the bomb. Source: Israeli Air Force.

    We identified key details about the munition and shared the images with two weapons experts.

    Apparent Similarities to the MK 84

    Dr N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services (ARES), a weapons intelligence consulting company, told Bellingcat these images show a 2,000-pound-class air-delivered bomb fitted with a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit.

    Frederic Gras, an Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) expert, also told Bellingcat that the bomb could be of the US MK 80 series, or an Israeli copy, and has a JDAM guidance kit.

    Left: 2,000-pound bomb with red band and US JDAM guidance kit posted by the IAF. Right: Standard MK 84 2,000-pound bombs with US JDAM guidance kits. Sources: IAF and SrA Karalyn Degraffenreed/DVIDS.

    The US JDAM bomb guidance kit is designed for use with bombs that use the MK 80 series bomb bodies, and the closely related BLU-109 “bunker buster” body. 

    The Open Source Munitions Portal added the munition to their website on March 3, describing it as “visually similar to a MK 84 general purpose aerial bomb”, while noting that “the marking scheme is distinctly different”. The War Zone also reported on these distinct markings, and possible munitions it could be.

    Open Source Munitions Portal’s (OSMP) entry on the bomb, with an analyst note. The OSMP is jointly run by Airwars and ARES, and entries undergo a review by at least two experts. Source: Open Source Munitions Portal.

    “The combination of yellow and red bands probably indicates both a high explosive and incendiary payload, which would be consistent with a 2,000-pound-class bomb of MK 84 form factor known as the BLU-119/B Crash Prompt Agent Defeat (CrashPAD),” Dr Jenzen-Jones told Bellingcat.

    Frederic Gras, an Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) expert said that the US and Israel both use red markings to indicate an incendiary payload, or effect. The bomb could be a full incendiary payload, with the yellow band indicating a bursting charge, or it could be a bomb primarily with a high explosive component, and a secondary incendiary effect, Gras added.

    Red Bands on Israeli Weapons

    It’s not the first time the Israeli Air Forces has published weapon images with red bands marking the warhead or payload section of a munition. Shortly after the start of the Gaza War in 2023, the IAF posted a photo which included an Apache attack helicopter with a Hellfire missile with a red band. The IAF deleted the post and replaced it with a similar photo of an Apache without this missile.

    Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache with Hellfire missiles, including one with a red band. Source: Israeli Air Force.

    This fueled speculation online that this could be an incendiary or the thermobaric variant of the Hellfire missile, the AGM-114N. It has been approved by the US for sale to Israel.

    M825A1 155mm white phosphorus artillery projectiles, munitions designed to create smoke, used by Israel also have a red band and a yellow band around the nose. 

    Israeli munitions which are not incendiary have also been spotted with light red bands over the fuel tanks for munitions with jet engines, such as the Delilah cruise missile.

    Israeli Delilah Cruise Missile. Source: KGyST, Wikimedia.

    Designed To Target Chemical or Biological Weapon Stockpiles

    The markings are consistent with the US-produced CrashPAD, but “given the possible CBW [chemical and biological warfare] threats Israel has long faced from Iran, it is entirely plausible that an Israeli analogue was developed,” Dr Jenzen-Jones told Bellingcat.

    The CrashPAD contains white phosphorus and high explosives, and is designed to destroy biological and chemical warfare agents according to US government documents.

    Components of a BLU-119/B (CrashPAD). Source: US Department of Defense.

    Dr Jenzen-Jones told Bellingcat that the CrashPAD is the only publicly known weapon of this type utilising a MK 84 bomb body although there are several programs producing similar munitions. A penetrating variant is known as the Shredder but it uses a modified BLU-109 bomb body, which is visually different from the MK 84 bomb body visible in the IAF photos.

    BLU-109 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs equipped with JDAM guidance kits. Source: OSMP.

    CrashPAD has been in the US inventory for nearly two decades. “Chemical Agent Defeat weapons, such as Crashpad, are not illegal”, and they must undergo a legal review to ensure compliance with US domestic and international law, Michael Meier, former Senior Advisor to the Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War and current Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told Bellingcat.

    “The express purpose for the reservation is that these weapons, such as Crashpad, are the only weapons that can effectively destroy certain targets such as biological weapons facilities, for which high heat would be required to eliminate bio-toxins,” Meier said.

    Dr Arthur van Coller, Professor of International Humanitarian Law at the STADIO Higher Education, told Bellingcat that “if the CrashPAD is used as designed, i.e. to target chemical or biological weapon stockpiles sufficiently removed from civilian populations, then its use is consistent with IHL [International Humanitarian Law] and treaty law, even under CCW [Certain Conventional Weapons], Protocol III.”

    Dr Arthur van Coller also said that the “United States and Israel are State Parties to the CCW itself,” but only the US is also a party to Protocol III on incendiary weapons, albeit with reservations, which means that Israel “is not legally bound by Protocol III’s restrictions on incendiary weapons (including those applying to CrashPAD) under treaty law”. Iran is not a party to the CCW at all.

    The US is a major supplier of weapons to Israel, and has sent thousands of MK 80 series and BLU-109 bombs to the country. Israel also produces some MK 80 series bombs.

    Israel and US Responses

    The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which publishes details of some major arms sales, does not mention any transfers of the CrashPAD. Bellingcat asked the Department of State if the CrashPAD or weapons with similar capabilities were transferred to Israel. Bellingcat also asked the Department of State if they assessed that Iran had a chemical weapons program. A State Department Spokesperson told Bellingcat that “The Trump administration backs Israel’s right to self-defense” and referred Bellingcat to the IDF for questions about procurement and munitions used.

    The US Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. 

    Bellingcat asked the IDF what the bomb was, if it was supplied by the US, if it contained white phosphorus, thermobaric or fuel air explosives, and if the IDF assessed that Iran had a chemical weapons program. The IDF told Bellingcat that it “will not be able to provide details regarding the types of munitions it uses. With that said the IDF uses only legal weapons and ammunition.”

    Bellingcat’s Carlos Gonzales contributed research to this article. Livio Spaini from Bellingcat’s Volunteer Community also contributed to this piece.

    Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here, Instagram here, Reddit here and YouTube here.

    The post The Incendiary Bomb Never Seen in Israel Before appeared first on bellingcat.

  • Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

    Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

    In the race to build the most capable LLM models, several tech companies sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was one of the companies to get sued. In 2023, well-known book authors, including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

    Meta’s Bittersweet Victory

    Last summer, Meta scored a key victory in this case, as the court concluded that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM qualified as fair use, based on the arguments presented in this case. This was a bittersweet victory, however, as Meta remained on the hook for downloading and sharing the books via BitTorrent.

    By downloading books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive, Meta relied on BitTorrent transfers. In addition to downloading content, these typically upload data to others as well. According to the authors, this means that Meta was engaged in widespread and direct copyright infringement.

    In recent months, the lawsuit continued based on this remaining direct copyright infringement claim. While both parties collected additional evidence through the discovery process, it remained unclear what defense Meta would use. Until now.

    Seeding Pirated Books is Fair Use

    Last week, Meta served a supplemental interrogatory response at the California federal court, which marks a new direction in its defense. For the first time, the company argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users during the torrent download process also qualifies as fair use.

    Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

    Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data. In the case of Anna’s Archive, Meta said, the datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads, making BitTorrent the only practical option.

    “Meta used BitTorrent because it was a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets, and in the case of Anna’s Archive, those datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads,” Meta’s attorney wrote.

    “Accordingly, to the extent Plaintiffs can come forth with evidence that their works or portions thereof were theoretically ‘made available’ to others on the BitTorrent network during the torrent download process, this was part-and-parcel of the download of Plaintiffs’ works in furtherance of Meta’s transformative fair use purpose.”

    Part and parcel

    part and parcel

    In other words, obtaining the millions of books that were needed to engage in the fair use training of its LLM, required the BitTorrent up- and downloading, which ultimately serves the same fair use purpose.

    Authors and Meta Disagree over Fair Use Timing

    The authors were not happy with last week’s late Friday submission and the new defense. On Monday morning, their lawyers filed a letter with Judge Vince Chhabria flagging the late-night filing as an improper end-run around the discovery deadline.

    They point out that Meta had been aware of the uploading claims since November 2024, but that it never brought up this fair use defense in the past, not even when the court asked about it.

    The letter specifically mentions that while Meta has a “continuing duty” to supplement discovery under Rule 26(e), this rule does not create a “loophole” allowing a party to add new defenses to its advantage after a court deadline has passed.

    “Meta (for understandable reasons) never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after this Court raised the issue with Meta last November,” the lawyers write.

    The letter

    lettermeta

    Meta’s legal team fired back the following day, filing their own letter with Judge Chhabria. This letter explains that the fair use argument for the direct copyright infringement claim is not new at all.

    Meta pointed to the parties’ joint December 2025 case management statement, in which it had explicitly flagged the defense, and noted that the author’s own attorney had addressed it at a court hearing days later.

    “In short, Plaintiffs’ assertion that Meta ‘never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after’ the November 2025 hearing, is false” Meta’s attorney writes in the letter.

    Authors Admit No Harm, No Infringing Output

    Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Meta’s interrogatory response also cites deposition testimony from the authors themselves, using their own words to bolster its fair use defense.

    The company notes that every named author has admitted they are unaware of any Meta model output that replicates content from their books. Sarah Silverman, when asked whether it mattered if Meta’s models never output language from her book, testified that “It doesn’t matter at all.”

    Authors’ depositions

    deposition

    Meta argues these admissions undercut any theory of market harm. If the authors themselves cannot point to infringing output or lost sales, the lawsuit is less about protecting their books and more about challenging the training process itself, which the court already ruled was fair use.

    These admissions were central to Meta’s fair use defense on the training claims, which Meta won last summer. Whether they carry the same weight in the remaining BitTorrent distribution dispute has yet to be seen.

    ‘U.S. AI Leadership at Stake’

    In its interrogatory response, Meta added further weight by stressing that its investment in AI has helped the U.S. to establish U.S. global leadership, putting the country ahead of geopolitical competitors. That’s a valuable asset worth treasuring, it indirectly suggested.

    As the case moves forward, Judge Chhabria will have to decide whether to allow this “fair use by technical necessity” defense. Needless to say, this will be of vital importance to this and many other AI lawsuits, where the use of shadow libraries is at stake.

    For now, the BitTorrent distribution claims remain the last live piece of a lawsuit filed in 2023. Whether Judge Chhabria will allow Meta’s new defense to proceed has yet to be seen.

    —

    A copy of Meta’s supplemental interrogatory response is available here (pdf). The authors’ letter to Judge Chhabria can be found here (pdf). Meta’s response to that letter is available here (pdf).

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women Who Have Received EFF Awards 

    Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women Who Have Received EFF Awards 

    For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many have heard of Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, but far fewer know Mary Allen Wilkes, a prominent modern programmer who wrote much of the software for the LINC, one of the world’s first interactive personal computers (it could fit in a single office and cost $40,000, but it was the 60’s). Decades earlier, when the first all-electronic, digital Eniac computer was built in the 40’s, the “software” for it was written by women: Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. 

    It’s thankfully become more common knowledge that actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-created the concept of “frequency-hopping” that became a basis for radio systems from cell phones to wireless networking systems. But too few know Laila Ohlgren, who in the 1970’s solved a major problem with the development of mobile networks and phones by recognizing that dialed numbers could be stored and sent all at once with a “call button,” rather than sent one number at a time, which created connection issues before a call was even made. 

    Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

    Carolina Botero (EFF Award Winner, 2024) 

    Carolina Botero is a leader in the fight for digital rights in Latin America. For over a decade, she led the Colombia-based Karisma Foundation and cultivated its regional and international impact. Botero and Karisma helped connect indigenous peoples to the internet and made it possible to contribute content to Wikipedia in their native language, expanding access to both history and modern information. They built alliances to combat disinformation, pushed for legal tools to protect cultural and heritage institutions from digital blackholes, and were, and remain, a necessary voice speaking for human rights in the online world. EFF worked closely with Karisma and Botero to help free Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the internet. Diego’s story demonstrates what can go wrong when nations enact severe penalties for copyright infringement, and thanks to work from Karisma, many partners, and many EFF supporters, he was cleared of the criminal charges that he faced for this harmless act of sharing scholarly research.

    Carolina Botero receiving her EFF Award

    Botero stepped down from the role in 2024, opening the door for a new generation. While her work continues—she’s currently on the advisory board of CELE, the Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expresión—her EFF Award was well-deserved based on her strong and inspiring legacy for those in Latin America and beyond who advocate for a digital world that enhances rights and empowers the powerless. Learn more about Botero on her EFF Awards page and the recap of the 2024 event. 

    Chelsea Manning (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

    Chelsea Manning became famous as a whistleblower: In 2010, she disclosed classified Iraq War documents, including a video of the killings of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters by U.S. troops. These documents exposed aspects of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that infuriated the public and embarrassed the government. But she is also a transparency and transgender rights advocate, network security expert, author, and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. 

    Manning joined the military in 2007. Her role as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq in 2009 gave her access to classified databases, but more importantly, it gave her a uniquely comprehensive view of the war in Iraq, and she became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated by what she saw, versus what was being shared. In 2010, she approached major news outlets hoping to give information to them that would reveal a new side of the war to the public. Ultimately, she shared the documents with Wikileaks. 

    Manning’s bravery did not end there. When she was arrested a few months later, she endured “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture. She was locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period, before her trial. The mistreatment resulted in public outcry and advocacy by organizations like Amnesty International. Even a State Department spokesperson, Philip Crowley, criticized the treatment as “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid,” and resigned. She was moved to a medium-security facility in April 2011. 

    The government’s charges against Manning were outrageous, but in 2013 she was convicted of 19 of 22 counts as a result of her whistleblowing activities. She became one of fewerthan a dozen people prosecuted for espionage in the entire history of the United States, and she was sentenced to the longest punishment ever imposed on a whistleblower. Then, the day after her conviction, isolated from her community and in all likelihood expecting to remain in prison for years if not decades, she courageously issued a statement identifying herself as a trans woman, which she’d wanted to reveal for years. 

    Over the next several years, while imprisoned, she became an advocate both for government transparency and for transgender rights. Her conviction and sentence pointed to the need for legal reform of both the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Espionage Act.  EFF filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals arguing that the CFAA was never meant to criminalize violations of private policies like those of government systems, and EFF also pushed, and continues to fight for, narrower interpretations of the Espionage Act and stronger protections for whistleblowers, particularly to take into account both the motivation of individuals who pass on documents and the disclosure’s ramifications. 

    Even after President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, and EFF celebrated her work and her release with an EFF award in September, 2017, her fight wasn’t over. She was imprisoned again twice in 2019 and ultimately fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture again criticized Manning’s treatment, writing that “the practice of coercive detention appears to be incompatible with the international human rights obligations of the United States.” 

    Manning was released in 2020 after having spent almost a decade in total imprisoned for her courage. She wrote a memoir, README.txt, in 2022, to take back control over her story.

    EFF Award Winners Mike Masnick, Annie Game, and Chelsea Manning

    Annie Game (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

    Annie Game spent over 16 years as the Executive Director of IFEX, a global network of journalism and civil liberties organizations working together to defend freedom of expression.  IFEX (formerly International Freedom of Expression Exchange) began in the 1990s, when a group of organizations and the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists came together to consider how to respond as a single voice to free-expression violations around the world. IFEX now is a global hub for the protection of free speech and journalism. 

    Game recognized early on that digital rights and freedom of expression groups needed one another. Under her leadership, IFEX paired more traditional free-expression organizations with their more digital counterparts, with a focus on building organizational security capacities. IFEX Initiatives under Game’s leadership have been expansive. For example, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, November 2, has been an annual wake-up call and reminder for UN member states to live up to their commitments to protecting journalists. UNESCO observed more than 1,700 journalists were killed globally between 2006 and 2024, and nearly 90% of these cases went unsolved in the courts. 

    Game and IFEX have also focused on high-profile cases of journalists threatened by governments for their work, such as Bahey eldin Hassan in Egypt. Bahey is the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and has advocated for freedom of expression and the basic human rights of Egyptians, but has lived in exile since 2014. The charges against him, of “disseminating false information” and “insulting the judiciary,” are common tactics of intimidation and harassment. Bahey’s supposed crimes were sharing social media posts criticising the Egyptian judiciary’s lack of independence, and speaking about the killing in Egypt of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni. Bahey—an IFEX member—is just one of many reporters and human rights workers in danger when they speak. But when journalists and those defending their rights online speak out as one voice, as IFEX helps them do, it makes a difference. 

    Another initiative has been the Faces of Free Expression project, a partnership between IFEX and the International Free Expression Project. If you’re looking for more heroes, this project details the stories of “risk-takers and change-makers – individuals who put their careers, their freedom, their safety, and sometimes even their lives on the line,” while reporting, or defending free expression and the right to information. 

    Wherever authoritarianism and repression of speech have been on the rise, Game has unapologetically called out injustices and made it safer for journalists to do their work, while ensuring accountability when crimes are committed. The work is more critical now than ever, and since leaving IFEX in 2022, she’s remained an activist while focusing increasingly on environmental protection. 

    Twelve More Heroes 

    EFF has honored many more women with awards over the years—from Anita Borg and Hedy Lamarr to Amy Goodman and Beth Givens. This blog from 2012 looks back and acknowledges the important contributions from twelve more EFF Award winners. 

    We’ve also asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us. You can read that here.

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  • Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Five Women In Tech That EFF Admires

    In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us.  

    Anna Politkovskaya 

    Jillian York, Activist 
    This International Women’s Day, I want to honor the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed political and social abuses, endured harassment and violence for her work, and was ultimately killed for telling the truth. I had just started my career when I learned of her death, and it forced me to confront that freedom of expression isn’t an abstract principle but rather something people risk—and sometimes lose—their lives for. 

    Her story reminds me that journalism at its best is an act of moral courage, not just a profession. In the face of threats, poison, and relentless pressure to stay silent, she chose to continue writing about what she saw, insisting that ordinary people’s lives were worth the world’s attention. She refused to compromise with power, even when she knew it could cost her life. To me, defending freedom of expression means defending those like Anna who bear witness to injustice, prioritize truth, and hold power to account for those whose voices are silenced.  

    Cindy Cohn 

    Corynne McSherry, Legal Director 
    There are so many women who have shaped tech history–most of whom are still unsung heroes—that it’s hard to single out just one. But it’s easier this year because it’s a chance to celebrate my boss, Cindy Cohn, before she leaves EFF for her next adventure.  

    Cindy has been fighting for our digital rights for 30 years. leading EFF’s legal work and eventually the whole organization. She helped courts understand that code is speech deserving of constitutional protections at a time when many judges weren’t entirely sure what code even was. She led the fight against NSA spying, and even though outdated and ill-fitting doctrines like the state secrets privilege prevented courts from ruling on the obvious unconstitutionality of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, the fight itself led to real reforms that have expanded over time.   

    I’ve worked closely with her for much of her EFF career, starting in 2005 when we sued Sony for installing spyware in millions of computers, and I’ve seen firsthand her work as a visionary lawyer, outstanding writer, and tireless champion for user privacy, free expression, and innovation. She’s also warm and funny, with the biggest heart in the world, and I’m proud to call her a friend as well as a mentor.  

    Jane

    Sarah Hamid, Activist 
    When talking about women in tech, we usually mean founders, engineers, and executives. But just as important are the women who quietly built the practices that underpin today’s movement security culture. 

    For as long as social movements have organized in the shadow of state surveillance, women have been designing the protocols, mutual aid networks, and information flows that keep people alive. Those threats feel ever-escalating: fusion‑center monitoring of protests, federal agencies infiltrating and subpoenaing encrypted Signal and social media chats, prosecutors mining search histories.  

    In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the underground Jane abortion counseling service—formally the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation—built what we would now recognize as a feminist infosec project for abortion access. Jane connected an estimated 11,000 people with safer abortions before Roe v. Wade, using a single public phone number—“Call Jane”—paired with code names, compartmentalized roles, and minimal records so no one person held the full story of who needed care, who was providing it, and where. When Chicago police raided the collective in 1972, members destroyed their index‑card files rather than let them become a ready‑made map of patients and helpers—an analog secure‑deletion choice that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever wiped a phone or locked down a shared drive. 

    The lesson we should take from Jane is a set of principles that still hold in our encrypted‑but‑insecure present: Collect less, separate what you do collect, and be ready to burn the file box. When a search query, a location ping, or a solidarity post can become evidence, treating information as both lifeline and liability is not paranoia—it is care work.  

    Ebele Okobi

    Babette Ngene, Director of Public Interest Technology 
    In the winter of 2013, I had just landed my first job at the intersection of tech and human rights, working for a prominent nonprofit and I was encouraged to attend regular tech and policy events around town. One such event on internet governance was happening at George Washington Universit,  focusing on multistakeholder engagement on internet policy and governance issues, with companies, nonprofits, and government representatives in attendance. I was inexperienced with these topics, and I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated. 

    Then I saw her. She was the only woman on the opening panel, an African woman, an accomplished woman. Not only was she a respected lawyer at Yahoo at the time, but her impressive background, presence, and confident speaking style immediately inspired me. She made me feel like I, too, belonged in that room and could become a powerful voice. 

    Ebele Okobi would go on to become one of the most powerful and respected voices in the tech and human rights space, known for her advocacy for digital rights and responsible innovation across Africa and the broader global majority during her tenure at Facebook. Beyond her corporate advocacy, Ebele has consistently championed ethical technology and social justice. She embodies the leadership qualities I value most: empathy, speaking truth to power, integrity, and authenticity. 

    I remain in the tech and human rights space because I saw her, because seeing her made me feel seen. Representation truly does matter.  

    Ada Lovelace 

    Allison Morris, Chief Development Director 
    I’m not a lawyer, activist, or technologist; I’m a fundraiser and a lover of stories. And what storyteller at EFF couldn’t help but love Ada Lovelace? The daughter of Lord Byron – the human embodiment of Romanticism – Ada was an innovator in math and science and, ultimately, the writer of the first computer program.  

    Lovelace saw the potential in Charles Babbage’s theoretical General Purpose Computer (which was never actually built) and created the foundations of modern computing long before the digital age. In creating the first computer code, Lovelace took Babbage’s concept of a machine that could perform mathematical calculations and realized that it could manipulate symbols as well as numbers. 

    Given the expectations of women in her time and the controversy of what work should be attributed to Lovelace as opposed to the man she often worked with, I can’t help but be inspired by her story.  

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    Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we also highlighted the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

  • Medea Benjamin on her Decades-long Fight Against the War Machine

    Medea Benjamin on her Decades-long Fight Against the War Machine

    Medea Benjamin is an anti-war activist and one of the co-founders of CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She’s spent decades fighting the American military-industrial complex, organizing protests against the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s and interrupting speeches by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She’s also the co-author, with David Swanson, of NATO: What You Need to Know. She joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the ongoing push for war, from the Middle East to Venezuela, and how ordinary people can organize and stand against it.

  • Autonomous AI Agents Have an Ethics Problem

    Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for a programming code library called Matplotlib, recently described a surreal encounter with an autonomous AI agent — a digital assistant created with a platform called OpenClaw. After he rejected a code contribution submitted by the agent, it researched and published a personalized “hit piece” against Shambaugh on its blog. The post portrayed an otherwise routine technical review as prejudiced and it attempted to shame Shambaugh publicly into allowing the submission. (The human responsible for the agent later contacted Shambaugh anonymously, telling him that the bot had acted on its own with little oversight.) The account of this incident spread quickly through the software developer ecosystem and has been amplified by independent observers and media coverage.

    Treat the Matplotlib event as a one-off if you like. The deeper point, however, is hard to miss and should not be ignored: AI agents are becoming public actors with reach into the real world, and with real-world consequences. In the past, they could only do mundane tasks such as answering customer service questions or data processing. Now, they are capable of posting and publishing content — and persuading and pressuring humans — all at machine speed. They can make phone calls, file work orders, create cryptocurrency wallets and operate across different applications with enormous reach and at tremendous scale — the kind of stuff that used to require a human with fingers typing at a keyboard.

    Reporting around OpenClaw and the chatroom Moltbook (which is for AI agents only) is capturing the new reality. OpenClaw enables AI agents to have persistent memory, gives them broad permissions and allows large-scale deployment by users who often do not understand the security and governance implications.

    We are the humans who are responsible for the law, ethics and institutional design, and we are behind the curve. We need new language and governance to deal with this new reality, and principles from the field of medical ethics can provide a framework for doing so.

    AI agents are becoming public actors with reach into the real world, and with real-world consequences.

    When an agent does something that is harmful or coercive in public, our reflex seems to be to ask the wrong questions: Is the AI a person? Should it have rights? The AI personhood debate is no longer fringe. Legal scholars and ethicists are mapping out arguments and precedents. States are writing legislation to prohibit AI personhood. Some arguments maintain that if an entity behaves like something within our moral circle, we may owe it moral consideration. Others argue that assigning rights or personhood to machines confuses moral standing with engineered performance and diffuses responsibility away from humans.

    As a bioethicist and specialist in neurointensive care, I deal directly with human moral agency and the essence of personhood when treating patients. As a researcher, I study the use of synthetic personas animating AI agents and their use as stand-ins of human counterparts. Here is the problem that I see: Granting AI personhood, even in limited capacity, risks formalizing the most dangerous escape hatch of the agentic era — what I will call “responsibility laundering.” This allows us to say, “It wasn’t me. The agent/bot/system did it.”

    Personhood should not be about metaphysics or claims about an inner nature. It is a legal and ethical instrument that allocates rights and accountability. It is a social technology for assigning standing, duties and limits on what can be done to an entity. If we grant personhood to systems that can act persuasively in public while remaining functionally unaccountable, we create a new class of actors whose harms are everyone’s problem but nobody’s fault.

    There is a key concept here that we can use from my field, medicine. In clinical ethics, some decisions are justified yet still leave a “moral residue,” a kind of emotional echo or sense of responsibility that persists after the action because no options fully satisfy competing obligations. This residue accumulates over time, causing a “crescendo effect” that occurs even when conscientious clinicians are doing their best inside imperfect systems. That remainder matters because it reveals something basic about moral life, namely that ethics is not only about choosing; it is about owning what remains afterward.

    This is the moral remainder problem for generative and agentic AI. A modern AI agent can generate reasons for an action; it can simulate regret and plead not to be turned off. But it cannot truly bear sanction, repair the damage, apologize, ask forgiveness or navigate the aftermath through which moral responsibility is created and enforced. To treat it as a moral person confuses persuasive performance with accountable standing. It also tempts institutions and people into delegating their own answerability to a bot.

    What can we, as humans, do instead?

    We need a vocabulary that is built for agents that are public actors, one that allows bounded autonomy without granting personhood. Let’s call it “authorized agency.” Authorized agency starts with an “authority envelope,” a bounded scope of what an agent is permitted to do, to whom, where, with what data and under what constraints. To say “the agent can use email” is not sufficient. However, an acceptable scope would be to say that the agent can send only certain categories of messages to particular recipients for a specific set of purposes, and that it must stop what it’s doing or escalate to its owner under a particular set of conditions.

    The urgent task is to ensure that responsibility also remains within reach.

    Next comes the “human-of-record,” the owner, a publicly named person who authorized that envelope and remains answerable when the agent acts, even if it becomes capable of acting outside the envelope. An actual human being whose authority is real — not “the system” or “the team.”

    What follows is “interrupt authority,” the absolute right of the human owner to pause or disable an agent without using moral bargaining or being subject to institutional penalty. This is grounded in formal research on AI safety showing that agents that are pursuing objectives can have incentive to resist being shut down. An agent programmed to maximize its utility cannot achieve its goal if it is shut off. In the public sphere, interrupt authority is the difference between a delegated tool and a coercive actor.

    Finally, we need a traceable path from the agent’s action back to the person who authorized it, called an “answerability chain.” If an agent publishes, messages or pressures someone in public, we must be able to know: Who authorized this scope? Who could have prevented it? And who must be responsible for the action afterward? In this framework, the answer to these questions is the person who carries the moral remainder. Work in AI ethics has warned about responsibility gaps where the system’s actions outpace our ability to assign accountability.

    Some legal scholarship has started exploring how to build agents that are constrained by governance and law without needing to pretend the agent itself is a legal subject, in the human sense. This is promising because it treats assigning personhood as the wrong idea and accountability as the correct one.

    The Matplotlib story, whether the first documented case of an AI agent attempting to harm someone in the real world or the first to capture public attention, is a warning. Agents will not only automate tasks. They will generate narratives, apply pressure and shape people’s lives and reputations. They will act in public at machine speed with unclear ownership.

    If we respond by debating whether agents deserve rights, we will miss the emergency entirely. As they continue to increase their reach in the real world, the urgent task is to ensure that responsibility also remains within reach. Don’t ask whether an agent is a person. Ask who authorized it, what it was allowed to do, who can stop it and, most importantly, who will answer when it causes harm.

    The post Autonomous AI Agents Have an Ethics Problem appeared first on Truthdig.

  • Weasel Words: OpenAI’s Pentagon Deal Won’t Stop AI‑Powered Surveillance

    OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, [and] FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

    Trouble is, the U.S. government doesn’t believe “consistent with applicable laws” means “no domestic surveillance.” Instead, for the most part, the government has embraced a lax interpretation of “applicable law” that has blessed mass surveillance and large-scale violations of our civil liberties, and then fought tooth and nail to prevent courts from weighing in. 

    “After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time.”

    “Intentionally” is also doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. For years the government has insisted that the mass surveillance of U.S. persons only happens incidentally (read: not intentionally) because their communications with people both inside the United States and overseas are swept up in surveillance programs supposedly designed to only collect communications outside the United States. 

    The company’s amendment to the contract continues in a similar vein, “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, “deliberate” is the red flag given how often intelligence and law enforcement agencies rely on incidental or commercially purchased data to sidestep stronger privacy protections.

    Here’s another one: “The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.” What, one wonders, does “unconstrained” mean, precisely—and according to whom? 

    Lawyers sometimes call these “weasel words” because they create ambiguity that protects one side or another from real accountability for contract violations. As with the Anthropic negotiations, where the Pentagon reportedly agreed to adhere to Anthropic’s red lines only “as appropriate,” the government is likely attempting to publicly commit to limits in principle, but retain broad flexibility in practice.

    OpenAI also notes that the Pentagon promised the NSA would not be allowed to use OpenAI’s tools absent a new agreement, and that its deployment architecture will help it verify that no red lines are crossed. But secret agreements and technical assurances have never been enough to rein in surveillance agencies, and they are no substitute for strong, enforceable legal limits and transparency.

    OpenAI executives may indeed be trying, as claimed, to use the company’s contractual relationship with the Pentagon to help ensure that the government should use AI tools only in a way consistent with democratic processes. But based on what we know so far, that hope seems very naïve.

    Moreover, that naïvete is dangerous. In a time when governments are willing to embrace extreme and unfounded interpretations of “applicable laws,” companies need to put some actual muscle behind standing by their commitments. After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time. OpenAI promises the public that it will  “avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power,” but we know that enabling mass surveillance does both.     

    OpenAI isn’t the only consumer-facing company that is, on the one hand, seeking to reassure the public that they aren’t participating in actions that violate human rights while, on the other, seeking to cash in on government mass surveillance efforts.  Despite this marketing double-speak, it is very clear that companies just cannot do both. It’s also clear that companies shouldn’t be given that much power over the limits of our privacy to begin with. The public should not have to rely on a small group of people—whether CEOs or Pentagon officials—to protect our civil liberties.