Aggregator

Staff

To contact individual staff members, replace [at] with @.

Alamara Khwaja Bettum (Executive Director)

Alamara has been with Statewatch since December 2025. She is a qualified immigration lawyer in the UK, specialising in asylum, family reunion, and human rights. Prior to Statewatch, Alamara worked with migrants and refugees for over ten years in both the humanitarian field in Iraqi Kurdistan and the legal sector in the UK. In addition to her legal expertise, she brings experience in policy development, advocacy, capacity building and anti-racism.

Email: alamara [at] statewatch.org

Chris Jones (Researcher)

Chris has been working for Statewatch since 2010 and in September 2020 was appointed as Executive Director. As of February 2026, he stepped back from the role to focus solely on research. He specialises in issues relating to policing, migration, privacy and data protection and security technologies.

Email: chris [at] statewatch.org

Romain Lanneau (Consultant Researcher)

Romain Lanneau has been working for Statewatch since 2022. He is a legal researcher, publishing on the topics of migration, asylum, and the use of new technologies for public policies. As an independent consultant, he worked for the European Network Against Racism, Fair Trials International and Data Rights. In addition to leading investigation and producing research, Romain has been assisting activists with strategic litigation on digital rights issues. He holds a LLM in International Migration and Refugee Law from the University of VU Amsterdam as well as a Master degree in Public International Law from the University of Lyon III.

Email: romain [at] statewatch.org

Frey Lindsay (Consultant Journalist)

Frey has been writing and coordinating our outsourcing borders bulletin on EU externalisation since 2025. Prior to Statewatch, Frey covered migration and borders for a decade. During his time as a journalist for the BBC World Service, he reported on the rise of anti-migration policies, Europe's border and surveillance technologies, Mediterranean search and rescue, and the exploitation of individuals by corporate and state powers worldwide. He has also written for openDemocracy, Thomson Reuters, and InfoMigrants. 

Email: frey [at] statewatch.org

Giacomo Zandonini (Consultant Journalist)

Giacomo is currently with us as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship, and is conducting research into the impact of digital surveillance on communities across Europe. He is an investigative reporter whose has exposed corporate interests and the expansion of state surveillance networks across Europe and West Africa. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Politico, Internazionale, The New Humanitarian, and more. He is the co-founder of the Fada Collective and received a special mention at the European Press Prize (2024).

Email: giacomo [at] statewatch.org

McKensie Marie (Head of Communications)

McKensie joined Statewatch in early 2024 to lead its communications efforts, shaping and implementing our communications strategy. She manages external outreach and oversees all aspects of our communication work. With experience as a communications specialist, designer, copywriter, and researcher, McKensie has worked with NGOs and charities across Europe and North America. 

 

Email: mckensie [at] statewatch.org

Rahmat Tavakkoli (Finance & Administration Worker)

Rahmat joined Statewatch in September 2021 to take care of our financial and administrative procedures, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and contribute to the smooth running of the office and the organization.

Email: admin [at] statewatch.org

 

Trustees

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche is Professor of Law at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, honorarium member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Her researches focus on the exigencies of the rule of law and their limitations in cases of exceptions: the situations of serious crises which allow the concentration of powers and restriction of rights (e.g. the use of the state of emergency), and the areas of legal confinement which are conducive to abuses of power and rights infringements (e.g. camps and centres where migrants and refugees are detained). She is member of the editorial board of various reviews and is involved in numerous academics networks regarding human rights law. You can find more information about her activities and publications on her personal webpage.

Laure Baudrihaye-Gérard

Laure is a lawyer based in Brussels, where she works on EU and Belgian criminal justice policy. She qualified as a solicitor in London, specialised in EU law and worked in private practice in both London and Brussels before studying criminology. After participating in several academic research projects, Laure joined Fair Trials, a criminal justice watchdog, in 2018. As Legal Director for Europe, she led on EU advocacy, strategic litigation in European courts and the coordination of a European-wide network of criminal defence lawyers, civil society and academic organisations. She has also been working as a prison monitor since 2019 in a large pre-trial detention prison in Brussels, and since 2020 heads up the appeals committee that adjudicates on complaints from detained people against the prison administration.

Jonathan Bloch

Jonathan Bloch studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically involved in South Africa in the worker and student movement and remains active in human rights circles in the UK. From 2002 until 2014 he chaired the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, one of the largest scholarship awarding organisations in South Africa. He was a councillor in the London Borough of Haringey 2002-14. He has co-authored several books on intelligence. He owns and runs a worldwide financial information business across four continents.

Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture with NGOs and migrant rights organisations. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Vicky has experience researching in immigration detention in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Denmark’s main deportation centre. She is currently embarking on a study of torture case file datasets with the Danish Institute Against Torture which aims to create a basis from which to better identify and thus respond to sexual torture and sexualised torturous violence with refugee survivors of torture more broadly.

Nadine Finch

Nadine was a member of the Statewatch contributors group for a number of years and also previously a trustee. She was a human rights barrister between 1992 and 2015 and an Upper Tribunal Judge from 2015 to 2020. She is now an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol and an Associate at Child Circle, a children's rights NGO based in Brussels.

　ハンセン病患者とされた男性Ｆさんが、１９５２年に起きた殺人事件をめぐり隔離施設内の「特別法廷」で裁かれ、無実を訴えながら死刑を執行された「菊池事件」の第４次再審請求で、熊本地裁（中田幹人裁判長）は１月28日、請求を棄却 […]

2022年7月8日、安倍晋三は奈良市内で選挙応援の演説中に山上徹也により殺害された。山上の母が、統一教会に高額の献金をした信者だったことから、統一教会への世論が厳しくなる。統一教会だけではなく、それまで半世紀以上にわたり教団と癒着してきた自民党も窮地に陥る。TM特別報告では、両者の蜜月が生んだ犠牲者を省みることなく、統一教会と自民党が保身に走る姿が記録されている。

PCI Express Integrity and Data Encryption（PCIe IDE）は、PCIe接続を介して転送されるデータに対し、暗号化と整合性保護の機能を提供します。PCIe IDEの仕様において、リンク上の通信を制御または介在可能な攻撃者により、データの処理が正しく行われなくなる複数の問題が報告されています。

2026年の衆議院選挙は、表面的には政権選択や政策論争の形を取りつつも、その内実においては、日本社会がどの方向に組み込まれ続けるのか。すなわち、軍国主義と対米従属を前提とした資本主義的秩序を是認するのか、それともそれに抗する可能性を模索するのか、が改めて問われた選挙でした。本稿は、選挙結果そのものの勝敗ではなく、その背後で再生産されている構造と階級関係に焦点を当てた所感です。

Flock contracts have quietly spread to cities across the country. But Flock ALPR (Automated License Plate Readers) erode civil liberties from the moment they're installed. While officials claim these cameras keep neighborhoods safe, the evidence tells a different story. The data reveals how Flock has enabled surveillance of people seeking abortions, protesters exercising First Amendment rights, and communities targeted by discriminatory policing.

This is exactly why cities are saying no. From Austin to Cambridge to small towns across Texas, jurisdictions are rejecting Flock contracts altogether, proving that surveillance isn't inevitable—it's a choice.

Join EFF's Sarah Hamid and Andrew Crocker along with Reem Suleiman from Fight for the Future and Kate Bertash from Rural Privacy Coalition to explore what's happening as Flock contracts face growing resistance across the U.S. We'll break down the legal implications of the data these systems collect, examine campaigns that have successfully stopped Flock deployments, and discuss the real-world consequences for people's privacy and freedom. The conversation will be followed by a live Q&A. 

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
Get the Flock Out of Our City
Thursday, February 19th
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Pacific
This event is LIVE and FREE!

Accessibility

This event will be live-captioned and recorded. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you have any accessibility questions regarding the event, please contact events@eff.org.

Event Expectations

EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations.

Upcoming Events

Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series: eff.org/ECUpdates. If you have a friend or colleague that might be interested, please join the fight for your digital rights by forwarding this link: eff.org/EFFectingChange. Thank you for helping EFF spread the word about privacy and free expression online. 

Recording

We hope you and your friends can join us live! If you can't make it, we’ll post the recording afterward on YouTube and the Internet Archive!

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information.

Yelp hosts millions of reviews written by internet users about local businesses. Most reviews are positive, but over the years, some businesses have tried to pressure Yelp to remove negative reviews, including through legal threats. Since its founding more than two decades ago, Yelp has fought major legal battles to defend reviewers’ rights and preserve the legal protections that allow consumers to share honest feedback online.

Aaron Schur is General Counsel at Yelp. He joined the company in 2010 as one of its first lawyers and has led its litigation strategy for more than a decade, helping secure court decisions that strengthened legal protections for consumer speech. He was interviewed by Joe Mullin, a policy analyst on EFF's Activism Team. 

Joe Mullin: How would you describe Section 230 to a regular Yelp user who doesn’t know about the law?   

Aaron Schur: I'd say it is a simple rule that, generally speaking, when content is posted online, any liability for that content is with the person that created it, not the platform that is displaying it. That allows Yelp to show your review and keep it up if a business complains about it. It also means that we can develop ways to highlight the reviews we think are most helpful and reliable, and mitigate fake reviews in a way, without creating liability for Yelp, because we're allowed to host third party content.

The political debate around Section 230 often centers around the behavior of companies, especially large companies. But we rarely hear about users, even though the law also applies to users. What is the user story that is getting lost? 

Section 230 at heart protects users. It enables a diversity of platforms and content moderation practices—whether it's reviews on Yelp, videos on another platform, whatever it may be. 

Without Section 230, platforms would face heavy pressure to remove consumer speech when we’re threatened with legal action—and that harms users, directly. Their content gets removed. It also harms the greater number of users who would access that content. 

The focus on the biggest tech companies, I think, is understandable but misplaced when it comes to Section 230. We have tools that exist to go after dominant companies, both at the state and the federal level, and Congress could certainly consider competition-based laws—and has, over the last several years. 

Tell me about the editorial decisions that Yelp makes regarding the highlighting of reviews, and the weeding out of reviews that might be fake.  

Yelp is a platform where people share their experiences with local businesses, government agencies, and other entities. People come to Yelp, by the millions, to learn about these places.

With traffic like that come incentives for bad actors to game the system. Some unscrupulous businesses try to create fake reviews, or compensate people to write reviews, or ask family and friends to write reviews. Those reviews will be biased in a way that won’t be transparent. 

Yelp developed an automated system to highlight reviews we find most trustworthy and helpful. Other reviews may be placed in a “not recommended” section where they don’t affect a business’s overall rating, but they’re still visible. That helps us maintain a level playing field and keep user trust. 

Tell me about what your process around complaints around user reviews look like. 

We have a reporting function for reviews. Those reports get looked at by an actual human, who evaluates the review and looks at data about it to decide whether it violates our guidelines. 

We don't remove a review just because someone says it's “wrong,” because we can't litigate the facts in your review. If someone says “my pizza arrived cold,” and the restaurant says, no, the pizza was warm—Yelp is not in a position to adjudicate that dispute. 

That's where Section 230 comes in. It says Yelp doesn’t have to [decide who’s right]. 

What other types of moderation tools have you built? 

Any business, free of charge, can respond to a review, and that response appears directly below it. They can also message users privately. We know when businesses do this, it’s viewed positively by users.

We also have a consumer alert program, where members of the public can report businesses that may be compensating people for positive reviews—offering things like free desserts or discounted rent. In those cases, we can place an alert on the business’s page and link to the evidence we received. We also do this when businesses make certain types of legal threats against users.

It’s about transparency. If a business’s rating is inflated, because that business is threatening reviewers who rate less than five stars with a lawsuit, consumers have a right to know what’s happening. 

How are international complaints, where Section 230 doesn’t come into play, different? 

We have had a lot of matters in Europe, in particular in Germany. It’s a different system there—it’s notice-and-takedown. They have a line of cases that require review sites to basically provide proof that the person was a customer of the business. 

If a review was challenged, we would sometimes ask the user for documentation, like an invoice, which we would redact before providing it. Often, they would do that, in order to defend their own speech online. Which was surprising to me! But they wouldn’t always—which shows the benefit of Section 230. In the U.S., you don’t have this back-and-forth that a business can leverage to get content taken down. 

And invariably, the reviewer was a customer. The business was just using the system to try to take down speech. 

Yelp has been part of some of the most important legal cases around Section 230, and some of those didn’t exist when we spoke in 2012. What happened in the Hassel v. Bird case, and why was that important for online reviewers?

Hassel v. Bird was a case where a law firm got a default judgment against an alleged reviewer, and the court ordered Yelp to remove the review—even though Yelp had not been a party to the case. 

We refused, because the order violated Section 230, due process, and Yelp’s First Amendment rights as a publisher. But the trial court and the appeal court both ruled against us, allowing a side-stepping of Section 230. 

The California Supreme Court ultimately reversed those rulings, and recognized that plaintiffs cannot accomplish indirectly [by suing a user and then ordering a platform to remove content] what they could not accomplish directly by suing the platform itself.

We spoke to you in 2012, and the landscape has really changed. Section 230 is really under attack in a way that it wasn’t back then. From your vantage point at Yelp, what feels different about this moment? 

The biggest tech companies got even bigger, and even more powerful. That has made people distrustful and angry—rightfully so, in many cases. 

When you read about the attacks on 230, it’s really politicians calling out Big Tech. But what is never mentioned is little tech, or “middle tech,” which is how Yelp bills itself. If 230 is weakened or repealed, it’s really the biggest companies, the Googles of the world, that will be able to weather it better than smaller companies like Yelp. They have more financial resources. It won’t actually accomplish what the legislators are setting out to accomplish. It will have unintended consequences across the board. Not just for Yelp, but for smaller platforms. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information. 

A decade ago, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, received 304 requests to alter or remove content over a two-year period, not including copyright complaints. In 2024 alone, it received 664 such takedown requests. Only four were granted. As complaints over user speech have grown, Wikimedia has expanded its legal team to defend the volunteer editors who write and maintain the encyclopedia. 

Jacob Rogers is Associate General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. He leads the team that deals with legal complaints against Wikimedia content and its editors. Rogers also works to preserve the legal protections, including Section 230, that make a community-governed encyclopedia possible. 

Joe Mullin: What kind of content do you think would be most in danger if Section 230 was weakened? 

Jacob Rogers: When you're writing about a living person, if you get it wrong and it hurts their reputation, they will have a legal claim. So that is always a concentrated area of risk. It’s good to be careful, but  I think if there was a looser liability regime, people could get to be too careful—so careful they couldn’t write important public information. 

Current events and political history would also be in danger. Writing about images of Muhammad has been a flashpoint in different countries, because depictions are religiously sensitive and controversial in some contexts. There are different approaches to this in different languages. You might not think that writing about the history of art in your country 500 years ago would get you into trouble—but it could, if you’re in a particular country, and it’s a flash point. 

Writing about history and culture matters to people. And it can matter to governments, to religions, to movements, in a way that can cause people problems. That’s part of why protecting pseudonymity and their ability to work on these topics is so important. 

If you had to describe to a Wikipedia user what Section 230 does, how would you explain it to them? 

If there was nothing—no legal protection at all—I think we would not be able to run the website. There would be too many legal claims, and the potential damages of those claims could bankrupt the company. 

Section 230 protects the Wikimedia Foundation, and it allows us to defer to community editorial processes. We can let the user community make those editorial decisions, and figure things out as a group—like how to write biographies of living persons, and what sources are reliable. Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it had centralized decision making. 

What does a typical complaint look like, and how does the complaint process look? 

In some cases, someone is accused of a serious crime and there’s a debate about the sources. People accused of certain types of wrongdoing, or scams. There are debates about peoples’ politics, where someone is accused of being “far-right” or “far-left.” 

The first step is community dispute resolution. On the top page of every article on Wikipedia there’s a button at the top that translates to “talk.” If you click it, that gives you space to discuss how to write the article. When editors get into a fight about what to write, they should stop and discuss it with each other first. 

If page editors can’t resolve a dispute, third-party editors can come in, or ask for a broader discussion. If that doesn’t work, or there’s harassment, we have Wikipedia volunteer administrators, elected by their communities, who can intervene. They can ban people temporarily, to cool off. When necessary, they can ban users permanently. In serious cases, arbitration committees make final decisions. 

And these community dispute processes we’ve discussed are run by volunteers, no Wikimedia Foundation employees are involved? Where does Section 230 come into play?

That’s right. Section 230 helps us, because it lets disputes go through that community process. Sometimes someone’s edits get reversed, and they write an angry letter to the legal department. If we were liable for that, we would have the risk of expensive litigation every time someone got mad. Even if their claim is baseless, it’s hard to make a single filing in a U.S. court for less than $20,000. There’s a real “death by a thousand cuts” problem, if enough people filed litigation. 

Section 230 protects us from that, and allows for quick dismissal of invalid claims. 

When we're in the United States, then that's really the end of the matter. There’s no way to bypass the community with a lawsuit. 

How does dealing with those complaints work in the U.S.? And how is it different abroad? 

In the US, we have Section 230. We’re able to say, go through the community process, and try to be persuasive. We’ll make changes, if you make a good persuasive argument! But the Foundation isn’t going to come in and change it because you made a legal complaint. 

But in the EU, they don’t have Section 230 protections. Under the Digital Services Act, once someone claims your website hosts something illegal, they can go to court and get an injunction ordering us to take the content down. If we don’t want to follow that order, we have to defend the case in court. 

In one German case, the court essentially said, "Wikipedians didn’t do good enough journalism.” The court said the article’s sources aren’t strong enough. The editors used industry trade publications, and the court said they should have used something like German state media, or top newspapers in the country, not a “niche” publication. We disagreed with that. 

What’s the cost of having to go to court regularly to defend user speech? 

Because the Foundation is a mission-driven nonprofit, we can take on these defenses in a way that’s not always financially sensible, but is mission sensible. If you were focused on profit, you would grant a takedown. The cost of a takedown is maybe one hour of a staff member’s time. 

We can selectively take on cases to benefit the free knowledge mission, without bankrupting the company. To do litigation in the EU costs something on the order of $30,000 for one hearing, to a few hundred thousand dollars for a drawn-out case.

I don’t know what would happen if we had to do that in the United States. There would be a lot of uncertainty. One big unknown is—how many people are waiting in the wings for a better opportunity to use the legal system to force changes on Wikipedia? 

What does the community editing process get right that courts can get wrong? 

Sources. Wikipedia editors might cite a blog because they know the quality of its research. They know what's going into writing that. 

It can be easy sometimes for a court to look at something like that and say, well, this is just a blog, and it’s not backed by a university or institution, so we’re not going to rely on it. But that's actually probably a worse result. The editors who are making that consideration are often getting a more accurate picture of reality. 

Policymakers who want to limit or eliminate Section 230 often say their goal is to get harmful content off the internet, and fast. What do you think gets missed in the conversation about removing harmful content? 

One is: harmful to whom? Every time people talk about “super fast tech solutions,” I think they leave out academic and educational discussions. Everyone talks about how there’s a terrorism video, and it should come down. But there’s also news and academic commentary about that terrorism video. 

There are very few shared universal standards of harm around the world. Everyone in the world agrees, roughly speaking, on child protection, and child abuse images. But there’s wild disagreement about almost every other topic. 

If you do take down something to comply with the UK law, it’s global. And you’ll be taking away the rights of someone in the US or Australia or Canada to see that content. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. EFF interviewed Wikimedia attorney Michelle Paulson about Section 230 in 2012.

今冬の大雪等に係る特別交付税（3月交付分）の繰上げ交付

IPネットワーク設備委員会報告（案）に対する意見募集の結果

「デジタル時代における放送制度の在り方に関する検討会」（第42回） の開催

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