I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point in the last year, my local supermarket appears to have transformed into a GNC supplement store. It’s not that the patrons started looking suspiciously jacked one day; nor did the music suddenly switch from soft rock to the Joe Rogan Experience It’s that now, nearly every single food item seems to be injected with protein.
SAN FRANCISCO – Nicole Ozer has been appointed as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation effective June 1.
Ozer is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital speech. She currently serves as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco. From 2004-2025, she was founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Ozer will succeed Cindy Cohn, who has been with EFF for more than 25 years and served as its executive director since 2015.
EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development, with a mission to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. The organization celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2025.
“I am honored to lead EFF forward in these critical times. EFF’s global work to defend and advance rights, justice, and democracy in the digital age is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives,” Ozer said. “I am ready to hit the ground running with EFF’s exceptional staff, board, and broad base of supporters and ensure that EFF is stronger than ever. Together, we can meet this moment and build a future where technology works for the people.”
“I couldn’t be happier to pass EFF’s reins over to Nicole,” Cohn said. “She has been our stalwart partner for many years in standing up for privacy, free speech and innovation online. I’m confident that she understands both the strong heart and the future potential of EFF especially as our work is more critical than ever.”
“Nicole Ozer is the ideal person to lead EFF during this unprecedented time in our nation’s history,” said EFF Board Chair Gigi Sohn. “She possesses all of the qualities necessary to lead the organization: great vision, strong management skills and deep substantive knowledge. The fact that she has worked alongside EFF for over two decades is icing on the cake. The EFF Board is excited to welcome Nicole and begin a new chapter in our history.”
Over her more than two decades leading public interest technology work, Ozer:
Ozer is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law; was a 2024-2025 technology and human rights fellow with the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; and in 2019 was a visiting researcher at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and a non-residential fellow with the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Ozer’s work has earned accolades including the Fearless Advocate Award from the American Constitution Society Bay Area, the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California, and a 2025 California Senate Members resolution commending her “unwavering dedication to defending and promoting civil liberties in the digital world.” Her writings on privacy and constitutional law have been published widely, and she regularly provides expert testimony for government proceedings, offers commentary in the press, speaks at academic conferences, and presents at national and global forums including South by Southwest and the Centre for European Policy Studies. She holds a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a bachelor’s in American Studies from Amherst College.
“It is incredibly exciting to welcome Nicole Ozer as our new leader at EFF at a time when the organization’s mission couldn’t be more essential,” said entrepreneur, activist, writer, and EFF Board member Anil Dash. “Nicole’s unique skills promise to build on the foundation that Cindy Cohn established as Executive Director, preparing EFF to serve an even more vital role in protecting privacy and innovation.”
Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993 when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. She served as EFF’s legal director and general counsel from 2000 through 2015, and as executive director since then. She also co-hosted EFF’s award-winning “How to Fix the Internet” podcast. Her memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, was published March 10 by MIT Press, and she is now conducting a national book tour.
EFF’s Board of Directors last year assembled a committee which undertook a wide search for Cohn’s successor with assistance from leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates.
Contact: press@eff.org
In a stark illustration of the sprawling scale and violent stakes of Taiwan’s criminal underworld, authorities announced the indictment of 10 individuals in a $1.03 billion money laundering scheme on the same day a notorious gambling fugitive was assassinated in Cambodia.
The twin developments highlight how Taiwanese illicit financial networks routinely exploit regional borders to wash illegal proceeds and evade justice across Southeast Asia.
According to a statement from the Yunlin District Prosecutors Office, a sophisticated criminal syndicate successfully laundered more than NT$33 billion ($1.03 billion) in illegal gambling profits by exploiting credit card loopholes on the gaming floors of Macau, a special administrative region on China’s southern coast.
The sweeping investigation, which began last November, uncovered a methodical process used by the group to disguise their illicit wealth.
The syndicate recruited “money mules” and deposited massive sums of illicit gambling funds directly into their personal bank accounts. By heavily padding these accounts, the mules were able to artificially inflate their credit card spending limits to extraordinary level. Under the guise of taking gambling trips to Macau, the agents used their supercharged credit cards to buy massive quantities of gaming chips. After briefly feigning participation at the tables or not gambling at all, they cashed the chips out in local currency, effectively scrubbing the funds clean.
According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA), the probe has led to the arrest of 20 suspects in total. However, the operation’s two alleged ringleaders remain at large, and authorities have issued 20-year arrest warrants for their capture.
As prosecutors detailed the massive casino bust, Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) confirmed on Tuesday that a prominent figure in the island’s underground gambling scene had been shot dead in Cambodia late Monday.
The slain suspect, Lin Ping-wen, was a high-profile fugitive deeply embedded in Taiwan’s illicit financial networks. He had been indicted in 2023 for his alleged involvement in the notorious “88 Lounge” fraud and money laundering case, according to CNA.
Lin had been on the run for months. After he failed to appear for his trial, authorities formally placed him on a wanted list and seized his NT$3 million bail in December 2024. Cambodian authorities are currently investigating his murder.
Lin’s assassination is the latest fallout from the 88 Lounge scandal, which has already toppled several major figures in the criminal underworld. In July 2023, Kuo Che-min, the owner of the infamous lounge, was arrested in Thailand and subsequently accused of laundering more than NT$2.7 billion ($84.4 million) through a complex web of illicit foreign currency transactions.
A controversial multimillion-dollar deal between New York City’s public hospital system and military contractor Palantir, first reported by The Intercept, is coming to an end, according to recent testimony before the city council.
The Intercept reported in February that the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates a network of public health care facilities across the city, had paid Palantir almost $4 million since 2023 for data analysis services. NYCHH says it used Palantir’s software to boost its efficiency in billing Medicaid and other public benefits, which included the automated scanning of patient health notes.
The contract prompted protests from activists and local organizers who objected to the hospital system’s use of software from a company whose technology has facilitated lethal airstrike targeting, wide-reaching surveillance of American citizens, and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government.”
At a March 16 meeting of the New York City Council, NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz disclosed that Palantir’s contract will not be renewed come October. Katz defended the health care network’s collaboration with Palantir on the grounds that there was an “absolute firewall” between patient data and the company’s government customers, such as ICE, that would prevent information sharing. “We haven’t had any problems,” Katz said, “And we’re going to end the contract anyway because we always intended it to be a short-term solution.”
According to Katz, data analysis previously conducted with Palantir’s help will be brought in-house following the contract’s expiration.
“Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government,” said Kenny Morris, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the contract documents with The Intercept.
“Our campaign against Palantir doesn’t stop in NYC,” Morris said. “We will continue to isolate this company and limit its destructive influence on our lives. In this city and around the world, communities are organizing to push more and more corporate clients, institutions, and politicians to cut ties with Palantir.”
The post Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data appeared first on The Intercept.
A Ukrainian judicial disciplinary committee has moved to fire Ihor Kachur, a highly controversial judge accused of participating in a massive court corruption ring.
Pending a final vote, Kachur has been suspended from the bench. While the current charges against him stem from secret audio recordings of judges fixing cases, Kachur is best known to the public for his role in the PrivatBank scandal—one of the largest financial frauds in Eastern European history.
Until 2016, PrivatBank was Ukraine’s largest commercial lender, handling the accounts of millions of everyday citizens. However, international auditors and the Ukrainian government discovered a massive “$5.5 billion hole” in the bank’s finances.
Authorities accused the bank’s billionaire co-owners, Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, of running a “shadow bank” from within. They allegedly used PrivatBank to issue billions of dollars in fake loans to their own shell companies, draining the bank of its cash.
To prevent the collapse of the entire Ukrainian economy, the government was forced to step in, nationalize PrivatBank in 2016, and bail it out using taxpayer money.
In April 2019, Judge Kachur chaired a judicial panel that stunned the global financial community. He ruled that the government’s 2016 nationalization of PrivatBank was illegal.
Kachur’s ruling handed a massive legal victory to Kolomoisky and complicated the Ukrainian government’s efforts to recover the missing billions through international courts in the U.S. and the U.K. Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov have consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Despite the outrage over the PrivatBank ruling, according to Slidstvo.Info, Kachur is actually being dismissed for a different scandal: the “Vovk tapes.”
In 2020, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau released secret audio recordings of judges from the Kyiv District Administrative Court. The tapes allegedly caught the court’s head judge, Pavlo Vovk, and his allies discussing how to trade favors, accept bribes, and issue fake rulings to protect their own power.
According to investigators, fake lawsuits were deliberately handed to Judge Kachur so he could issue rulings that blocked anti-corruption officials from vetting corrupt judges. Kachur’s lawyers argued that the audio quality on the tapes was too poor to prove it was his voice, but the disciplinary committee ultimately voted to hold him liable.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Kachur tried to quit before he could be fired. In 2024, he applied for formal resignation, a move that would have granted him a lucrative, lifetime pension paid for by the state.
However, Ukraine’s High Council of Justice froze his resignation because of the open corruption investigation. After a court rejected Kachur’s attempt to force his retirement through early this year, the disciplinary committee was finally able to vote for his dismissal this week.
A pair of relatives behind a sanctioned, state-of-the-art kamikaze drone manufacturer in Russia have another, hidden business — shipping wheat from occupied Ukraine.
Ukraine’s government has long insisted that Russian export of Ukrainian grain is pillage, a war crime under international law. Independent researchers have estimated the country’s losses in the billions of dollars.
Reporters from Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo.info found that Roman Gurov, 41, and 75-year-old Lyudmila Gurova — Roman’s mother, according to news reports and social media posts — run a company exporting tens of thousands of tons of wheat grown in the region of Mariupol, a port city seized by Russia after a brutal three-month siege in the early months of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Their company, Nika LLC, supplies the wheat to Turkey and Egypt. Reporters found that much of the wheat was destined for a Turkish miller, Erisler Gida Sanayi Ve Ticaret A.S. As well as supplying the UN World Food Programme, Erisler exports noodles to Ukraine.
Gurov, Gurova, Nika LLC, and Erisler didn’t reply to requests for comment from OCCRP.
Turkey has faced allegations of importing grain from Russian-occupied territory before. In June 2022, four months into the invasion, Ukraine’s then-ambassador to Turkey said in a press conference that “Russia is brazenly and unprecedentedly stealing Ukrainian grain and exporting it from occupied Crimea to foreign countries, including Turkey.”
Turkey’s foreign minister at the time, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, reacted by saying his country “will not allow illegal trade in Ukrainian grain or any other products from any country, including Russia.”
In a January interview with Ukraine’s national news agency, the Ukrainian deputy foreign intelligence chief said that last year Russia shipped more than two million tonnes of grain, worth $400 million, from the “temporarily occupied territories” of Zaporizhia, Crimea, and Donetsk.
No mention can be found of Gurov in the Russian press until July 2023, when Russia media reported that he signed an agreement with the deputy governor of Rostov Oblast, bordering eastern Ukraine.
According to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, Gurov’s company Roboavia — sanctioned by the U.S. and Ukraine in 2024 — manufactures the Sarych reconnaissance drone and the Surprise strike drone, a weapon described by a Belgium-based news service on the arms industry, armyrecognition.com, as being “virtually invisible and inaudible to adversaries” and able to lay mines.
Roboavia was first registered in 2015, with Lyudmila Gurova becoming the owner in July 2022, according to Russia’s corporate registry. Gurov became general director of the company in November 2022. Neither shows up in the companies’ registry as having had any prior involvement in drone production or related industries.
Gurov became the owner of the grain trading company Nika in June 2020, and Gurova became a director in November 2022.
Slidstvo.info obtained over 20 “declarations of conformity” — certificates confirming that goods meet set standards — for Nika’s wheat from July 2022 to early 2026, almost all of which say that its production sites are in Mariupol.
In 2023, Nika shipped $3.7 million worth of wheat (15,500 tons) to Turkey and Egypt. The following year, its wheat exports to the two countries almost quadrupled to 59,500 tons, worth $12.9 million. Nika shipped another 4,500 tons of wheat in the first quarter of 2025.
The ultimate recipient of at least 7,800 tons of the wheat was the Turkish company Erisler, according to one April 2024 maritime manifest — a document submitted by the carrier to customs control — obtained by Slidstvo.info.
The document states that the Russian ship Alfa M, which has been under Ukrainian sanctions since November 2023, shipped the wheat to the Russian port of Temryuk, across the Sea of Azov from Mariupol. And from there, according to Russian customs data, the goods went to Turkey.
Erisler produces mainly flour, with an output of 850,000 tons at its four mills, according to its website. In 2013, the company began manufacturing what it called “Turkey’s first national instant noodle brand” made from wheat flour and widely sold in Ukraine.
Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, has been named a 2026 Fellow by the Computer History Museum. The annual Fellow Award, to be presented on April 25, 2026, honors pioneers whose work has shaped the foundations of computing and expanded access to knowledge in the digital age. Brewster is recognized for his pioneering roles in online search engines, as well as his enduring leadership in digital preservation and open access through the Internet Archive. He joins an extraordinary group of past Fellows, including Steve Wozniak, Katherine Johnson, Gordon Moore, and Tim Berners-Lee.
The Computer History Museum describes this year’s Fellows as individuals who have “changed the world through their advancements in computing and evolution of the digital age”—a description that resonates deeply with Brewster’s decades-long mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”
Everyone is invited to join us online for the Fellow Awards ceremony livestream, starting at 7:30pm PT on April 25th. In-person attendance at the awards ceremony is by invitation only. During the awards ceremony, attendees will hear directly from honorees through reflections on their journeys, video tributes, and remarks on their visions for the future.
For the Internet Archive community, this recognition is not only a celebration of Brewster’s work, but of the shared effort to preserve our digital heritage and keep it accessible for generations to come.
The post New date May 6th: An Introduction to EMDR with Dr Naomi Fisher appeared first on Mad in the UK.
