The Tesla CEO has spent months alienating EV buyers. Now, his company stands to lose federal support and contracts from an angry Republican president.

Mast Reforestation is selling carbon-removal credits as it restores forests that were incinerated by wildfires.

The expected frequency of flooding is one reason the city’s health department ranks it as more pressing than cyberattacks or pandemics.

California’s controversial rail project is about to lose federal funding, but powerful Democrats are doubling down on their support.

The agenda is “no longer dictated solely by traditional powers like the G7, but involves influential leadership from emerging economies,” said former Secretary of State John Kerry.

Countries would set their own water efficiency targets under the proposal, which would not be legally binding.

Hail hammers U.S. roofs, cars and crops to the tune of $10 billion a year in damage. Project ICECHIP observes hailstorms from the inside to see how they form.

When navigating a place that we’re only somewhat familiar with, we often rely on unique landmarks to help make our way. However, if we’re looking for an office in a brick building, and there are many brick buildings along our route, we might use a rule like looking for the second building on a street, rather than relying on distinguishing the building itself.

Until that ambiguity is resolved, we must hold in mind that there are multiple possibilities (or hypotheses) for where we are in relation to our destination. In a study of mice, MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that these hypotheses are explicitly represented in the brain by distinct neural activity patterns.

This is the first time that neural activity patterns that encode simultaneous hypotheses have been seen in the brain. The researchers found that these representations, which were observed in the brain’s retrosplenial cortex (RSC), not only encode hypotheses but also could be used by the animals to choose the correct way to go.

“As far as we know, no one has shown in a complex reasoning task that there’s an area in association cortex that holds two hypotheses in mind and then uses one of those hypotheses, once it gets more information, to actually complete the task,” says Mark Harnett, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

Jakob Voigts PhD ’17, a former postdoc in Harnett’s lab and now a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience.

Ambiguous landmarks

The RSC receives input from the visual cortex, the hippocampal formation, and the anterior thalamus, which it integrates to help guide navigation.

In a 2020 paper, Harnett’s lab found that the RSC uses both visual and spatial information to encode landmarks used for navigation. In that study, the researchers showed that neurons in the RSC of mice integrate visual information about the surrounding environment with spatial feedback of the mice’s own position along a track, allowing them to learn where to find a reward based on landmarks that they saw.

In their new study, the researchers wanted to delve further into how the RSC uses spatial information and situational context to guide navigational decision-making. To do that, the researchers devised a much more complicated navigational task than typically used in mouse studies. They set up a large, round arena, with 16 small openings, or ports, along the side walls. One of these openings would give the mice a reward when they stuck their nose through it. In the first set of experiments, the researchers trained the mice to go to different reward ports indicated by dots of light on the floor that were only visible when the mice get close to them.

Once the mice learned to perform this relatively simple task, the researchers added a second dot. The two dots were always the same distance from each other and from the center of the arena. But now the mice had to go to the port by the counterclockwise dot to get the reward. Because the dots were identical and only became visible at close distances, the mice could never see both dots at once and could not immediately determine which dot was which.

To solve this task, mice therefore had to remember where they expected a dot to show up, integrating their own body position, the direction they were heading, and path they took to figure out which landmark is which. By measuring RSC activity as the mice approached the ambiguous landmarks, the researchers could determine whether the RSC encodes hypotheses about spatial location. The task was carefully designed to require the mice to use the visual landmarks to obtain rewards, instead of other strategies like odor cues or dead reckoning.

“What is important about the behavior in this case is that mice need to remember something and then use that to interpret future input,” says Voigts, who worked on this study while a postdoc in Harnett’s lab. “It’s not just remembering something, but remembering it in such a way that you can act on it.”

The researchers found that as the mice accumulated information about which dot might be which, populations of RSC neurons displayed distinct activity patterns for incomplete information. Each of these patterns appears to correspond to a hypothesis about where the mouse thought it was with respect to the reward.

When the mice get close enough to figure out which dot was indicating the reward port, these patterns collapsed into the one that represents the correct hypothesis. The findings suggest that these patterns not only passively store hypotheses, they can also be used to compute how to get to the correct location, the researchers say.

“We show that RSC has the required information for using this short-term memory to distinguish the ambiguous landmarks. And we show that this type of hypothesis is encoded and processed in a way that allows the RSC to use it to solve the computation,” Voigts says.

Interconnected neurons

When analyzing their initial results, Harnett and Voigts consulted with MIT Professor Ila Fiete, who had run a study about 10 years ago using an artificial neural network to perform a similar navigation task.

That study, previously published on bioRxiv, showed that the neural network displayed activity patterns that were conceptually similar to those seen in the animal studies run by Harnett’s lab. The neurons of the artificial neural network ended up forming highly interconnected low-dimensional networks, like the neurons of the RSC.

“That interconnectivity seems, in ways that we still don’t understand, to be key to how these dynamics emerge and how they’re controlled. And it’s a key feature of how the RSC holds these two hypotheses in mind at the same time,” Harnett says.

In his lab at Janelia, Voigts now plans to investigate how other brain areas involved in navigation, such as the prefrontal cortex, are engaged as mice explore and forage in a more naturalistic way, without being trained on a specific task.

“We’re looking into whether there are general principles by which tasks are learned,” Voigts says. “We have a lot of knowledge in neuroscience about how brains operate once the animal has learned a task, but in comparison we know extremely little about how mice learn tasks or what they choose to learn when given freedom to behave naturally.”

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, a Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT postdoctoral fellowship, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines at MIT, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Three years ago, Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting the disposal of used clothing and textiles. The law aims to reduce waste and promote recycling and repurposing. While many are unaware of the nascent law, MIT students at the helm of Infinite Threads were happy to see its passage.

Infinite Threads is a spinoff of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee — a group of students running reuse-related events since 2013. With new leadership and a new focus, Infinite Threads went from holding three to four popup sales a year to nine.

A group of students collects lightly used clothing from MIT community members and sells the items at deeply discounted prices at popup sales held several times each semester. Sales take place outside of the Student Center to optimize the high foot traffic in the area. Anyone can purchase items at the sales, and Infinite Threads also accepts clothing donations at the popups as well.

Administrators Cameron Dougal ’25, a recent graduate who majored in urban science and planning with computer science (Course 11-6), and Erin Hovendon, a rising senior in mechanical engineering (Course 2), led the small student-run organization for much of the year 2024-25 academic year.

“Our mission is to reduce material waste. We collect a lot of clothing at the end of the spring semester when students are moving out of their residence halls. We then sell items such as shirts, jackets, pants, and jeans at the popup sales for $2 to $6,” says Dougal, adding “we often have a lot of leftover T-shirts from residence hall events and career fairs that we give away for free. These MIT-related items demonstrate the importance of a hyperlocal reuse ecosystem. As soon as these types of items leave campus, there is a much lower chance that they will find a new home.”

Hovendon, who has an interest in sustainability and hopes to pursue a career in renewable energy, joined the group after seeing an email sent to DormSpam. “It was a great opportunity to jump into a sustainability leadership role while also helping the MIT community. We aim to offer affordable clothing options, and we get a lot of positive feedback about the thrift popups — I love hearing from students that they got clothing items they now wear frequently from one of our sales,” says Hovendon.

“Any money made at the popups is used to pay the student workers and to rent the U-Haul we use to bring the clothing we store at MIT’s Furniture Exchange warehouse to the Student Center. Our goal is simple: we want to keep clothing out of landfills, which in return helps the planet,” says Dougal.

Studies show that a pair of cotton denim jeans can take up to a year to decompose, while jeans or items of clothing made with polyester can take 40-200 years to decompose. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, blue jeans account for 5 percent of landfill space. Infinite Threads saves clothing items from ending up in landfills.

Hovendon agrees. “We don’t make a lot of money at the sales — it’s not our goal. Our goal is to help the environment. We received some seed funding from the MIT Women's League, the Office of Sustainability, and the MIT Fabric Innovation Hub.”

Infinite Threads also collaborates with the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS) to bring awareness to their work.

“Infinite Threads is a fantastic model for how students can directly take action, empower individuals, and leverage the collective community to design out clothing waste and climate impacts through the reuse culture. MIT students, like Cameron and Erin, are well-positioned to tackle sustainability challenges on campus and out in the world as they bring a willingness to solve complex challenges, experiment with many solutions, and grapple with operational realities,” says Brian Goldberg, assistant director of MITOS.

In 2024-25, the club sold over 1,000 clothing items. Any clothing that does not sell at the thrift shop is given to Helpsy, an organization that helps keep clothing out of the trash and landfills while also creating jobs. Dougal and Hovendon say they have diverted about 750 pounds of textiles to Helpsy in 2024-25 alone.

Lauren Higgins, a rising senior majoring in political science who took over managing Infinite Threads from Dougal earlier this year, says, “I originally joined as one of the staff for Infinite Threads, and I love being able to help out with waste reduction and sustainability efforts on campus. It's been great to see our impact, and I hope we're able to continue that this upcoming year.”

Animators could create more realistic bouncy, stretchy, and squishy characters for movies and video games thanks to a new simulation method developed by researchers at MIT.

Their approach allows animators to simulate rubbery and elastic materials in a way that preserves the physical properties of the material and avoids pitfalls like instability.

The technique simulates elastic objects for animation and other applications, with improved reliability compared to other methods. In comparison, many existing simulation techniques can produce elastic animations that become erratic or sluggish or can even break down entirely.

To achieve this improvement, the MIT researchers uncovered a hidden mathematical structure in equations that capture how elastic materials deform on a computer. By leveraging this property, known as convexity, they designed a method that consistently produces accurate, physically faithful simulations.

“The way animations look often depends on how accurately we simulate the physics of the problem,” says Leticia Mattos Da Silva, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this research. “Our method aims to stay true to physical laws while giving more control and stability to animation artists.”

Beyond 3D animation, the researchers also see potential future uses in the design of real elastic objects, such as flexible shoes, garments, or toys. The method could be extended to help engineers explore how stretchy objects will perform before they are built.

She is joined on the paper by Silvia Sellán, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University; Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj, an MIT graduate student; and senior author Justin Solomon, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and leader of the Geometric Data Processing Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference.

Truthful to physics

If you drop a rubber ball on a wooden floor, it bounces back up. Viewers expect to see the same behavior in an animated world, but recreating such dynamics convincingly can be difficult. Many existing techniques simulate elastic objects using fast solvers that trade physical realism for speed, which can result in excessive energy loss or even simulation failure.

More accurate approaches, including a class of techniques called variational integrators, preserve the physical properties of the object, such as its total energy or momentum, and, in this way, mimic real-world behavior more closely. But these methods are often unreliable because they depend on complex equations that are hard to solve efficiently.

The MIT researchers tackled this problem by rewriting the equations of variational integrators to reveal a hidden convex structure. They broke the deformation of elastic materials into a stretch component and a rotation component, and found that the stretch portion forms a convex problem that is well-suited for stable optimization algorithms.

“If you just look at the original formulation, it seems fully non-convex. But because we can rewrite it so that is convex in at least some of its variables, we can inherit some advantages of convex optimization algorithms,” she says.

These convex optimization algorithms, when applied under the right conditions, come with guarantees of convergence, meaning they are more likely to find the correct answer to the problem. This generates more stable simulations over time, avoiding issues like a bouncing rubber ball losing too much energy or exploding mid-animation.

One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was reinterpreting the formulation so they could extract that hidden convexity. Some other works explored hidden convexity in static problems, but it was not clear whether the structures remained solid for dynamic problems like simulating elastic objects in motion, Mattos Da Silva says.

Stability and efficiency

In experiments, their solver was able to simulate a wide range of elastic behavior, from bouncing shapes to squishy characters, with preservation of important physical properties and stability over long periods of time. Other simulation methods quickly ran into trouble: Some became unstable, causing erratic behavior, while others showed visible damping.

“Because our method demonstrates more stability, it can give animators more reliability and confidence when simulating anything elastic, whether it’s something from the real world or even something completely imaginary,” she says.

While the solver is not as fast as some simulation tools that prioritize speed over accuracy, it avoids many of the trade-offs those methods make. Compared to other physics-based approaches, it also avoids the need for complex, nonlinear solvers that can be sensitive and prone to failure.

In the future, the researchers want to explore techniques to further reduce computational cost. In addition, they want to explore applications of this technique in fabrication and engineering, where reliable simulations of elastic materials could support the design of real-world objects, like garments and toys.

“We were able to revive an old class of integrators in our work. My guess is there are other examples where researchers can revisit a problem to find a hidden convexity structure that could offer a lot of advantages,” she says.

This research is funded, in part, by a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the CSAIL Future of Data Program, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Laboratory, the Wistron Corporation, and the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center.

Academic research groups and startups are essential drivers of scientific progress. But some projects, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the Human Genome Project, are too big for any one academic lab or loose consortium. They’re also not immediately profitable enough for industry to take on.

That’s the gap researchers at MIT were trying to fill when they created the concept of focused research organizations, or FROs. They describe a FRO as a new type of entity, often philanthropically funded, that undertakes large research efforts using tightly coordinated teams to create a public good that accelerates scientific progress.

The original idea for focused research organizations came out of talks among researchers, most of whom were working to map the brain in MIT Professor Ed Boyden’s lab. After they began publishing their ideas, however, the researchers realized FROs could be a powerful tool to unlock scientific advances across many other applications.

“We were quite pleasantly surprised by the range of fields where we see FRO-shaped problems,” says Adam Marblestone, a former MIT research scientist who co-founded the nonprofit Convergent Research to help launch FROs in 2021. “Convergent has FRO proposals from climate, materials science, chemistry, biology — we even have launched a FRO on software for math. You wouldn’t expect math to be something with a large-scale technological research bottleneck, but it turns out even there, we found a software engineering bottleneck that needed to be solved.”

Marblestone helped formulate the idea for focused research organizations at MIT with a group including Andrew Payne SM ’17, PhD ’21 and Sam Rodriques PhD ’19, who were PhD students in Boyden’s lab at the time. Since then, the FRO concept has caught on. Convergent has helped attract philanthropic funding for FROs working to decode the immune system, identify the unintended targets of approved drugs, and understand the impacts of carbon dioxide removal in our oceans.

In total, Convergent has supported the creation of 10 FROs since its founding in 2021. Many of those groups have already released important tools for better understanding our world — and their leaders believe the best is yet to come.

“We’re starting to see these first open-source tools released in important areas,” Marblestone says. “We’re seeing the first concrete evidence that FROs are effective, because no other entity could have released these tools, and I think 2025 is going to be a significant year in terms of our newer FROs putting out new datasets and tools.”

A new model

Marblestone joined Boyden’s lab in 2014 as a research scientist after completing his PhD at Harvard University. He also worked in a new position called director of scientific architecting at the MIT Media Lab, which Boyden helped create, through which he tried to organize individual research efforts into larger projects. His own research focused on overcoming the challenges of measuring brain activity across large scales.

Marblestone discussed this and other large-scale neuroscience problems with Payne and Rodriques, and the researchers began thinking about gaps in scientific funding more broadly.

“The combination of myself, Sam, Andrew, Ed, and others’ experiences trying to start various large brain-mapping projects convinced us of the gap in support for medium-sized science and engineering teams with startup-inspired structures, built for the nonprofit purpose of building scientific infrastructure,” Marblestone says.

Through MIT, the researchers also connected with Tom Kalil, who was at the time working as the U.S. deputy director for technology and innovation. Rodriques wrote about the concept of a focused research organization as the last chapter of his PhD thesis in 2019.

“Ed always encouraged us to dream very, very big,” Rodriques says. “We were always trying to think about the hardest problems in biology and how to tackle them. My thesis basically ended with me explaining why we needed a new structure that is like a company, but nonprofit and dedicated to science.”

As part of a fellowship with the Federation of American Scientists in 2020, and working with Kalil, Marblestone interviewed scientists in dozens of fields outside of neuroscience and learned that the funding gap existed across disciplines.

When Rodriques and Marblestone published an essay about their findings, it helped attract philanthropic funding, which Marblestone, Kalil, and co-founder Anastasia Gamick used to launch Convergent Research, a nonprofit science studio for launching FROs.

“I see Ed’s lab as a melting pot where myself, Ed, Sam, and others worked on articulating a need and identifying specific projects that might make sense as FROs,” Marblestone says. “All those ideas later got crystallized when we created Convergent Research.”

In 2021, Convergent helped launch the first FROs: E11 Bio, which is led by Payne and committed to developing tools to understand how the brain is wired, and Cultivarium, an FRO making microorganisms more accessible for work in synthetic biology.

“From our brain mapping work we started asking the question, ‘Are there other projects that look like this that aren’t getting funded?’” Payne says. “We realized there was a gap in the research ecosystem, where some of these interdisciplinary, team science projects were being systematically overlooked. We knew a lot of amazing things would come out of getting those projects funded.”

Tools to advance science

Early progress from the first focused research organizations has strengthened Marblestone’s conviction that they’re filling a gap.

[C]Worthy is the FRO building tools to ensure safe, ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. It recently released an interactive map of alkaline activity to improve our understanding of one method for sequestering carbon known as ocean alkalinity enhancement. Last year, a math FRO, Lean, released a programming language and proof assistant that was used by Google’s DeepMind AI lab to solve problems in the International Mathematical Olympiad, achieving the same level as a silver medalist in the competition for the first time. The synthetic biology FRO Cultivarium, in turn, has already released software that can predict growth conditions for microbes based on their genome.

Last year, E11 Bio previewed a new method for mapping the brain called PRISM, which it has used to map out a portion of the mouse hippocampus. It will be making the data and mapping tool available to all researchers in coming months.

“A lot of this early work has proven you can put a really talented team together and move fast to go from zero to one,” Payne says. “The next phase is proving FROs can continue to build on that momentum and develop even more datasets and tools, establish even bigger collaborations, and scale their impact.”

Payne credits Boyden for fostering an ecosystem where researchers could think about problems beyond their narrow area of study.

“Ed’s lab was a really intellectually stimulating, collaborative environment,” Payne says. “He trains his students to think about impact first and work backward. It was a bunch of people thinking about how they were going to change the world, and that made it a particularly good place to develop the FRO idea.”

Marblestone says supporting FROs has been the highest-impact thing he’s been able to do in his career. Still, he believes the success of FROs should be judged over closer to 10-year periods and will depend on not just the tools they produce but also whether they spin out companies, partner with other institutes, and create larger, long-lasting initiatives to deploy what they built.

“We were initially worried people wouldn’t be willing to join these organizations because it doesn’t offer tenure and it doesn’t offer equity in a startup,” Marblestone says. “But we’ve been able to recruit excellent leaders, scientists, engineers, and others to create highly motivated teams. That’s good evidence this is working. As we get strong projects and good results, I hope it will create this flywheel where it becomes easier to fund these ideas, more scientists will come up with them, and I think we’re starting to get there.”

If you run a site on the open web, chances are you've noticed a big increase in traffic over the past few months, whether or not your site has been getting more viewers, and you're not alone. Operators everywhere have observed a drastic increase in automated traffic—bots—and in most cases attribute much or all of this new traffic to AI companies.

Background

AI—in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI (genAI)—rely on compiling as much information from relevant sources (i.e., "texts written in English" or "photographs") as possible in order to build a functional and persuasive model that users will later interact with. While AI companies in part distinguish themselves by what data their models are trained on, possibly the greatest source of information—one freely available to all of us—is the open web.

To gather up all that data, companies and researchers use automated programs called scrapers (sometimes referred to by the more general term "bots") to "crawl" over the links available between various webpages and save the types of information they're tasked with as they go. Scrapers are tools with a long, and often beneficial, history: services like search engines, the Internet Archive, and all kinds of scientific research rely on them.

When scrapers are not deployed thoughtfully, however, they can contribute to higher hosting costs, lower performance, and even site outages, particularly when site operators see so many of them in operation at the same time. In the long run all this may lead to some sites shutting down rather than bearing the brunt of it.

For-profit AI companies must ensure they do not poison the well of the open web they rely on in a short-sighted rush for training data.

Bots: Read the Room

There are existing best practices those who use scrapers should follow. When bots and their operators ignore these guideposts it sends a signal to site operators, sometimes explicitly, that they can or should cut off their access, impede performance, and in the worst case it may take a site down for all users. Some companies appear to follow these practices most of the time, but we see increasing reports and evidence of new bots that don't.

First, scrapers should follow instructions given in a site's robots.txt file, whether those are to back off to a certain crawling rate, exclude certain paths, or not to crawl the site at all.

Second, bots should send their requests with a clearly labeled User Agent string which indicates their operator, their purpose, and a means of contact.

Third, those running scrapers should provide a process for site operators to request back-offs, rate caps, exclusions, and to report problematic behavior via the means of contact info or response forms linked via the User Agent string.

Mitigations for Site Operators

Of course, if you're running a website dealing with a flood of crawling traffic, waiting for those bots to change their behavior for the better might not be realistic. Here are a few suggested, if imperfect, mitigations based in part on our own sometimes frustrating experiences.

First, use a caching layer. In most cases a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or an "edge platform" (essentially a newer iteration of a CDN) can provide this for you, and some services offer a free tier for non-commercial users. There are also a number of great projects if you prefer to self-host. Some of the tools we've used for caching include varnish, memcached, and redis.

Second, convert to static content to prevent resource-intensive database reads. In some cases this may reduce the need for caching.

Third, use targeted rate limiting to slow down bots without taking your whole site down. But know this can get difficult when scrapers try to disguise themselves with misleading User Agent strings or by spreading a fleet of crawlers out across many IP addresses.

Other mitigations such as client-side validation (e.g. CAPTCHAs or proof-of-work) and fingerprinting carry privacy and usability trade-offs, and we warn against deploying them without careful forethought.

Where Do We Go From Here?

To reiterate, whatever one's opinion of these particular AI tools, scraping itself is not the problem. Automated access is a fundamental technique of archivists, computer scientists, and everyday users that we hope is here to stay—as long as it can be done non-destructively. However, we realize that not all implementers will follow our suggestions for bots above, and that our mitigations are both technically advanced and incomplete.

Because we see so many bots operating for the same purpose at the same time, it seems there's an opportunity here to provide these automated data consumers with tailored data providers, removing the need for every AI company to scrape every website, seemingly, every day.

And on the operators' end, we hope to see more web-hosting and framework technology that is built with an awareness of these issues from day one, perhaps building in responses like just-in-time static content generation or dedicated endpoints for crawlers.

As part of multi-pronged effort towards deregulation, the Federal Trade Commission has asked the public to identify any and all “anti-competitive” regulations. Working with our friends at Authors Alliance, EFF answered, calling attention to a set of anti-competitive regulations that many don’t  recognize as such: the triennial exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the cumbersome process on which they depend.

Copyright grants exclusive rights to creators, but only as a means to serve the broader public interest. Fair use and other limitations play a critical role in that service by ensuring that the public can engage in commentary, research, education, innovation, and repair without unjustified restriction. Section 1201 effectively forbids fair uses where those uses require circumventing a software lock (a.k.a. technological protection measures) on a copyrighted work.

Congress realized that Section 1201 had this effect, so it adopted a safety valve—a triennial process by which the Library of Congress could grant exemptions. Under the current rulemaking framework, however, this intended safety valve functions more like a chokepoint. Individuals and organizations seeking an exemption to engage in lawful fair use must navigate a burdensome, time-consuming administrative maze. The existing procedural and regulatory barriers ensure that the rulemaking process—and Section 1201 itself—thwarts, rather than serves, the public interest.

The FTC does not, of course, control Congress or the Library of Congress. But we hope its investigation and any resulting report on anti-competitive regulations will recognize the negative effects of Section 1201 and that the triennial rulemaking process has failed to be the check Congress intended. Our comments urge the FTC to recommend that Congress repeal or reform Section 1201. At a minimum, the FTC should advocate for fundamental revisions to the Library of Congress’s next triennial rulemaking process, set for 2026, so that copyright law can once again fulfill its purpose: to support—rather than thwart—competitive and independent innovation.

You can find the full comments here.

“My wife, Erin Tevonian, and I both graduated last week with our PhDs in biological engineering, a program we started together when we arrived at MIT in fall 2019. At the time, we had already been dating for three years, having met as classmates in the bioengineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. We went through college together — taking classes, vacationing with friends, and biking cross-country, all side-by-side — and so we were lucky to be able to continue doing so by coming to Course 20 at MIT together. It was during our graduate studies at MIT that we got engaged (spring 2022) and married (last September), a milestone that we were able to celebrate with the many wonderful friends we found at MIT.

First-year students in the MIT Biological Engineering PhD program rotate through labs of interest before picking where they will complete their doctorates, and so we found our way to research groups by January 2020 just before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted on-campus research and caused social distancing. Erin completed her PhD in Doug Lauffenburger and Linda Griffith’s labs, during which she used computational and experimental models to study human insulin resistance and built better liver tissue models for recapitulating disease pathology. I completed my PhD in Anders Hansen’s lab and studied how DNA folds in 3D space to drive gene regulation by building and applying a new method for mapping DNA architecture at finer resolutions than previously possible. The years flew by as we dove into our research projects, and we defended our PhDs a week apart back in April.

Erin and I were standing at Commencement with the Class of 2025 at the moment this photo was snapped, smiling as we listened to MIT’s school song. Graduation is a bittersweet milestone because it represents the end of what has been an incredible adventure for us, an adventure that made campus feel like home, so I must admit that I wasn’t sure how I would feel going into graduation week. This moment, though, felt like a fitting close for our time at MIT, and I was filled with gratitude for the many memories, opportunities, and adventures I got to share with Erin over the course of grad school. I also graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management/School of Engineering’s Leaders for Global Operations program (hence the stole), so I was also reflecting on the many folks I’ve met across campus that make MIT the wonderful place that it is, and how special it is to be a part of a community that makes it so hard to say goodbye.”

—Viraat Goel MBA ’25, PhD ’25

Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit it to Scene at MIT.

The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your privacy, to prevent different branches of government from using sensitive data to punish or harass you, and to perserve the trust in and legitimacy of important civic institutions.

Attempts to Centralize All the Government’s Information About You

This process of consolidation has taken several forms. The purported Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been seeking access to the data and computer systems of dozens of government agencies. According to one report, access to the data of these agencies has given DOGE, as of April 2025, hundreds of pieces of personal information about people living in the United States–everything ranging from financial and tax information, health and healthcare information, and even computer I.P. addresses. EFF is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and DOGE for disclosing personal information about government employees to people who don’t need it in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974.

Another key maneuver in centralizing government information has been to steamroll the protections that were in place that keep this information away from agencies that don’t need, or could abuse, this information. This has been done by ignoring the law, like the Trump administration did when it ordered the IRS make tax information available for the purposes of immigration enforcement. It has also been done through the creation of new (and questionable) executive mandates that all executive branch information be made available to the White House or any other agency. Specifically, this has been attempted with the March 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Stopping Waste Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” which mandates that the federal government, as well as all 50 state governments, allow other agencies “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems.” But executive orders can’t override privacy laws passed by Congress.

Not only is the Trump administration trying to consolidate all of this data institutionally and statutorily, they are also trying to do it technologically. A new report revealed that the administration has contracted Palantir—the open-source surveillance and security data-analytics firm—to fuse data from multiple agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.

Why it Matters and What Can Go Wrong 

The consolidation of government records equals more government power that can be abused. Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services or collect taxes. The danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected.

Imagine, for instance, a scenario where a government employee could be denied health-related public services or support because of the information gathered about them by an agency that handles HR records. Or a person’s research topic according to federal grants being used to weigh whether or not that person should be allowed to renew a passport.

Marginalized groups are most vulnerable to this kind of abuse, including to locate individuals for immigration enforcement using tax records. Government records could also be weaponized against people who receive food subsidies, apply for student loans, or take government jobs. 

Congress recognized these dangers 50 years ago when it passed the Privacy Act to put strict limits on the government’s use of large databases. At that time, trust in the government eroded after revelations about White House enemies’ lists, misuse of existing government personality profiles, and surveillance of opposition political groups.

There’s another important issue at stake: the future of federal and state governments that actually have the information and capacity to help people. The more people learn to distrust the government because they worry the information they give certain government agencies may be used to hurt them in the future, the less likely people will be to participate or seek the help they need. The fewer people engage with these agencies, the less likely they will be to survive. Trust is a key part of any relationship between the governed and government and when that trust is abused or jettisoned, the long-term harms are irreparable.

EFF, like dozens of other organizations, will continue to fight to ensure personal records held by the government are only used and disclosed as needed and only for the purpose they were collected, as federal law demands. 

Related Cases: American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management

“Pernicious.”

“Unprecedented... cringe-worthy.”

“Egregious.”

“Shocking.” 

These are just some of the words that federal judges used in recent weeks to describe President Trump’s politically motivated and vindictive executive orders targeting law firms that have employed people or represented clients or causes he doesn’t like. 

But our favorite word by far is “unconstitutional.” 

EFF was one of the very first legal organizations to publicly come out in support of Perkins Coie when it became the first law firm to challenge the legality of President Trump’s executive order targeting it. Since then, EFF has joined four amicus briefs in support of targeted law firms, and in all four cases, judges from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia have indicated they’re having none of it. Three have issued permanent injunctions deeming the executive orders null and void, and the fourth seems to be headed in that same direction. 

Trump issued his EO against Perkins Coie on March 6. In a May 2 opinion finding the order unconstitutional and issuing a permanent injunction, Senior Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote:  

“By its terms, this Order stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees—from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries, and mailroom attendants—due to the Firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current President disagrees, as well as the Firm’s own speech,” Howell wrote. “In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’ EO 14230 takes the approach of ‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,’ sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” 

“Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, … is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with ‘tolerance, not coercion.’” 

 Trump issued a similar EO against Jenner & Block on March 25. In a May 23 opinion also finding the order unconstitutional and issuing a permanent injunction, Senior Judge John D. Bates wrote: 

“This order—which takes aim at the global law firm Jenner & Block—makes no bones about why it chose its target: it picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed. Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution. Most obviously, retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work—and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward—violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’ Nat’l Rifle Ass’n of Am. v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024). More subtle but perhaps more pernicious is the message the order sends to the lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy. This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers. It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.” 

 Trump issued his EO targeting WilmerHale on March 27. In a May 27 opinion finding that order unconstitutional, Senior Judge Richard J. Leon wrote: 

“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this! Accordingly, they took pains to enshrine in the Constitution certain rights that would serve as the foundation for that independence. Little wonder that in the nearly 250 years since the Constitution was adopted no Executive Order has been issued challenging these fundamental rights. Now, however, several Executive Orders have been issued directly challenging these rights and that independence. One of these Orders is the subject of this case. For the reasons set forth below, I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!” 

“Taken together, the provisions constitute a staggering punishment for the firm’s protected speech! The Order is intended to, and does in fact, impede the firm’s ability to effectively represent its clients!” 

“Even if the Court found that each section could be grounded in Executive power, the directives set out in each section clearly exceed that power! The President, by issuing the Order, is wielding his authority to punish a law firm for engaging in litigation conduct the President personally disfavors. Thus, to the extent the President does have the power to limit access to federal buildings, suspend and revoke security clearances, dictate federal hiring, and manage federal contracts, the Order surpasses that authority and in fact usurps the Judiciary’s authority to resolve cases and sanction parties that come before the courts!” 

The fourth case in which EFF filed a brief involved Trump’s April 9 EO against Susman Godfrey. In that case, Judge Loren L. AliKhan is still considering whether to issue a permanent injunction, but on April 15 gave a fiery ruling from the bench in granting a temporary restraining order against the EO’s enforcement. 

“The executive order is based on a personal vendetta against a particular firm, and frankly, I think the framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power,” AliKhan said, as quoted by Courthouse News Service. "The government cannot hold lawyers hostage to force them to agree with it, allowing the government to coerce private business, law firms and lawyers solely on the basis of their view is antithetical to our constitutional republic and hampers this court, and every court’s, ability to adjudicate these cases.” 

And, as quoted by the New York Times: “Law firms across the country are entering into agreements with the government out of fear that they will be targeted next and that coercion is plain and simple. And while I wish other firms were not capitulating as readily, I admire firms like Susman for standing up and challenging it when it does threaten the very existence of their business. … The government has sought to use its immense power to dictate the positions that law firms may and may not take. The executive order seeks to control who law firms are allowed to represent. This immensely oppressive power threatens the very foundations of legal representation in our country.” 

As we wrote when we began filing amicus briefs in these cases, an independent legal profession is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. As a nonprofit legal organization that frequently sues the federal government, EFF understands the value of this bedrock principle and how it–and First Amendment rights more broadly–are threatened by President Trump’s executive orders. It is especially important that the whole legal profession speak out against these actions, particularly in light of the silence or capitulation of a few large law firms. 

We’re glad the courts agree.

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