Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.

Let us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important functions of this branch of government is to administer the law, including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as ...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 29 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02519-3

Transforming school environments into nature-based climate shelters not only promotes cooling and greening under extreme heat, but also fosters quality education, ecological restoration, empowerment and reconnection with nature, and provides children with healthier, safer, more playful, equitable and climate-proof spaces.

This year, you may have heard EFF sounding off about our civil liberties on NPR, BBC Radio, or any number of podcasts. But we also started sharing our voices directly with listeners in 2025. In June, we revamped EFFector, our long-running electronic newsletter, and launched a new audio edition to accompany it.

Providing a recap of the week's most important digital rights news, EFFector's audio companion features exclusive interviews where EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists can dig deeper into the biggest stories in privacy, free speech, and innovation. Here are just some of the best interviews from EFFector Audio in 2025.

Unpacking a Social Media Spying Scheme

Earlier this year, the Trump administration launched a sprawling surveillance program to spy on the social media activity of millions of noncitizens—and punish those who express views it doesn't like. This fall, EFF's Lisa Femia came onto EFFector Audio to explain how this scheme works, its impact on free speech, and, importantly, why EFF is suing to stop it.

"We think all of this is coming together as a way to chill people's speech and make it so they do not feel comfortable expressing core political viewpoints protected by the First Amendment," Femia said.

Challenging the Mass Surveillance of Drivers

But Lisa was hardly the only guest talking about surveillance. In November, EFF's Andrew Crocker spoke to EFFector about Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), a particularly invasive and widespread form of surveillance. ALPR camera networks take pictures of every passing vehicle and upload the location information of millions of drivers into central databases. Police can then search these databases—typically without any judicial approval—to instantly reconstruct driver movements over weeks, months, or even years at a time.

"It really is going to be a very detailed picture of your habits over the course of a long period of time," said Crocker, explaining how ALPR location data can reveal where you work, worship, and many other intimate details about your life. Crocker also talked about a new lawsuit, filed by two nonprofits represented by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California, challenging the city of San Jose's use of ALPR searches without a warrant.

Similarly, EFF's Mario Trujillo joined EFFector in early November to discuss the legal issues and mass surveillance risks around face recognition in consumer devices.

Simple Tips to Take Control of Your Privacy

Online privacy isn’t dead. But tech giants have tried to make protecting it as annoying as possible. To help users take back control, we celebrated Opt Out October, sharing daily privacy tips all month long on our blog. In addition to laying down some privacy basics, EFF's Thorin Klosowski talked to EFFector about how small steps to protect your data can build up into big differences.

"This is a way to kind of break it down into small tasks that you can do every day and accomplish a lot," said Klosowski. "By the end of it, you will have taken back a considerable amount of your privacy."

User privacy was the focus of a number of EFFector interviews. In July, EFF's Lena Cohen spoke about what lawmakers, tech companies, and individuals can do to fight online tracking. That same month, Matthew Guariglia talked about precautions consumers can take before bringing surveillance devices like smart doorbells into their homes.

Digging Into the Next Wave of Internet Censorship

One of the most troubling trends of 2025 was the proliferation of age verification laws, which require online services to check, estimate, or verify users’ ages. Though these mandates claim to protect children, they ultimately create harmful censorship and surveillance regimes that put everyone—adults and young people alike—at risk.

This summer, EFF's Rin Alajaji came onto EFFector Audio to explain how these laws work and why we need to speak out against them.

"Every person listening here can push back against these laws that expand censorship," she said. "We like to say that if you care about internet freedom, this fight is yours."

This was just one of several interviews about free speech online. This year, EFFector also hosted Paige Collings to talk about the chaotic rollout of the UK's Online Safety Act and Lisa Femia (again!) to discuss the abortion censorship crisis on social media.

You can hear all these episodes and future installments of EFFector's audio companion on YouTube or the Internet Archive. Or check out our revamped EFFector newsletter by subscribing at eff.org/effector!

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

In 2025, elected officials across the country began treating surveillance technology purchases differently: not as inevitable administrative procurements handled by police departments, but as political decisions subject to council oversight and constituent pressure. This shift proved to be the most effective anti-surveillance strategy of the year.

Since February, at least 23 jurisdictions fully ended, cancelled, or rejected Flock Safety ALPR programs (including Austin, Oak Park, Evanston, Hays County, San Marcos, Eugene, Springfield, and Denver) by recognizing surveillance procurement as political power, not administrative routine.

Legacy Practices & Obfuscation

For decades, cities have been caught in what researchers call "legacy procurement practices": administrative norms that prioritize "efficiency" and "cost thresholds" over democratic review. 

Vendors exploit this inertia through the "pilot loophole." As Taraaz and the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience (CRCR) note in a recent report, "no-cost offers" and free trials allow police departments to bypass formal procurement channels entirely. By the time the bill comes due, the surveillance is already normalised in the community, turning a purchase decision into a "continuation of service" that is politically difficult to stop.

This bureaucracy obscures the power that surveillance vendors have over municipal procurement decisions. As Arti Walker-Peddakotla details, this is a deliberate strategy. Walker-Peddakotla details how vendors secure "acquiescence" by hiding the political nature of surveillance behind administrative veils: framing tools as "force multipliers" and burying contracts in consent agendas. For local electeds, the pressure to "outsource" government decision-making makes vendor marketing compelling. Vendors use "cooperative purchasing" agreements to bypass competitive bidding, effectively privatizing the policy-making process. 

The result is a dangerous "information asymmetry" where cities become dependent on vendors for critical data governance decisions. The 2025 cancellations finally broke that dynamic.

The Procurement Moment

This year, cities stopped accepting this "administrative" frame. The shift came from three converging forces: audit findings that exposed Flock's lack of safeguards, growing community organizing pressure, and elected officials finally recognizing that saying "no" to a renewal was not just an option—it was the responsible choice.

When Austin let its Flock pilot expire on July 1, the decision reflected a political judgment: constituents rejected a nationwide network used for immigration enforcement. It wasn't a debate about retention rates; it was a refusal to renew.

These cancellations were also acts of fiscal stewardship. By demanding evidence of efficacy (and receiving none) officials in Hays County, Texas and San Marcos, Texas rejected the "force multiplier" myth. They treated the refusal of unproven technology not just as activism, but as a basic fiduciary duty. In Oak Park, Illinois, trustees cancelled eight cameras after an audit found Flock lacked safeguards, while Evanston terminated its 19-camera network shortly after. Eugene and Springfield, Oregon terminated 82 combined cameras in December. City electeds have also realized that every renewal is a vote for "vendor lock-in." As EPIC warns, once proprietary systems are entrenched, cities lose ownership of their own public safety data, making it nearly impossible to switch providers or enforce transparency later.

The shift was not universal. Denver illustrated the tension when Mayor Mike Johnston overrode a unanimous council rejection to extend Flock's contract. Council Member Sarah Parady rightly identified this as "mass surveillance" imposed "with no public process." This is exactly why procurement must be reclaimed: when treated as technical, surveillance vendors control the conversation; when recognized as political, constituents gain leverage.

Cities Hold the Line Against Mass Surveillance

EFF has spent years documenting how procurement functions as a lever for surveillance expansion, from our work documenting Flock Safety's troubling data-sharing practices with ICE and federal law enforcement to our broader advocacy on surveillance technology procurement reform. The 2025 victories show that when cities understand procurement as political rather than technical, they can say no. Procurement power can be the most direct route to stopping mass surveillance. 

As cities move into 2026, the lesson is clear: surveillance is a choice, not a mandate, and your community has the power to refuse it. The question isn't whether technology can police more effectively; it's whether your community wants to be policed this way. That decision belongs to constituents, not vendors.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

Defending encryption has long been a bedrock of our work. Without encryption, it's impossible to have private conversations or private data storage. This year, we’ve seen attacks on these rights from all around the world. 

Europe Goes All in On Breaking Encryption, Mostly Fails (For Now)

The European Union Council has repeatedly tried to pass a controversial message scanning proposal, known as “Chat Control,” that would require secure messaging providers to scan the contents of messages. Every time this has come up since it was first introduced in 2022, it got batted down—because no matter how you slice it, client-side scanning breaks end-to-end encryption. The Danish presidency seemed poised to succeed in passing Chat Control this year, but strong pushback from across the EU caused them to reconsider and rework their stance. In its current state, Chat Control isn’t perfect, but it at least includes strong language to protect encryption, which is good news for users. 

Meanwhile, France tried to pass its own encryption-breaking legislation. Unlike Chat Control, which pushed for client-side scanning, France took a different approach: allowing so-called “ghost participants,” where law enforcement could silently join encrypted chats. Thankfully, the French National Assembly did the right thing and rejected this dangerous proposal. 

It wasn’t all wins, though.

Perhaps the most concerning encryption issue is still ongoing in the United Kingdom, where the British government reportedly ordered Apple to backdoor its optional end-to-end encryption in iCloud. In response, Apple disabled one of its strongest security features, Advanced Data Protection, for U.K. users. After some back and forth with the U.S., the U.K. allegedly rewrote the demand, to clarify it was limited to only apply to British users. That doesn’t make it any better. Tribunal hearings are planned for 2026, and we’ll continue to monitor developments.

Speaking of developments to keep an eye on, the European Commission released its “Technology Roadmap on Encryption” which discusses new ways for law enforcement to access encrypted data. There’s a lot that could happen with this roadmap, but let’s be clear, here: EU officials should scrap any roadmap focused on encryption circumvention and instead invest in stronger, more widespread use of end-to-end encryption. 

U.S. Attempts Fall Flat

The U.S. had its share of battles, too. The Senate re-introduced the STOP CSAM Act, which threatened to compromise encryption by requiring encrypted communication providers to have knowledge about what sorts of content their services are being used to send. The bill allows encrypted services to raise a legal defense—but only after they’ve been sued. That's not good enough. STOP CSAM would force encryption providers to defend against costly lawsuits over content they can't see or control. And a jury could still consider the use of encryption to be evidence of wrongdoing. 

In Florida, a bill ostensibly about minors' social media use also just so happened to demand a backdoor into encryption services—already an incredible overreach. It went further, attempting to ban disappearing messages and grant parents unrestricted access to their kids’ messages as well. Thankfully, the Florida Legislature ended without passing it.

It is unlikely these sorts of attempts to undermine encryption will suddenly stop. But whatever comes next, EFF will continue to stand up for everyone's right to use encryption to have secure and private online communications. 

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

New research:

Abstract: Coleoid cephalopods have the most elaborate camouflage system in the animal kingdom. This enables them to hide from or deceive both predators and prey. Most studies have focused on benthic species of octopus and cuttlefish, while studies on squid focused mainly on the chromatophore system for communication. Camouflage adaptations to the substrate while moving has been recently described in the semi-pelagic oval squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana). Our current study focuses on the same squid’s complex camouflage to substrate in a stationary, motionless position. We observed disruptive, uniform, and mottled chromatic body patterns, and we identified a threshold of contrast between dark and light chromatic components that simplifies the identification of disruptive chromatic body pattern. We found that arm postural components are related to the squid position in the environment, either sitting directly on the substrate or hovering just few centimeters above the substrate. Several of these context-dependent body patterns have not yet been observed in ...