The Battle for Brain Privacy, Intimate AI Advertising, Turning Guns into Garden Tools
December 5, 2025

During the Cold War, the first implants showing that we could control animal minds sparked panic. The C.I.A. had its own clandestine experimental mind-control program. People warned of brain warfare. Those fears [are] back, along with a conversation about what it means to have freedom of thought at a time when technology is literally being implanted in our brains. Brain computer interface, or B.C.I. ... are very small devices that go right on the surface of your brain, where they can pick up neural activity. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth to a computer program, which decodes the information. In a sense, they’re hooked up to an artificial intelligence. So the neural network inside your mind communicates with a neural network outside. And through that, we are able to reconstruct people’s intentions. For people with degenerative diseases, or who are paralyzed, or who otherwise have lost important abilities, these implants have been totally revolutionary. These patients can move their hands, type and in some cases, speak again. Optogenetics, a technique for turning isolated neurons on and off, has been used to implant false memories in mice, raising the possibility that, in the distant future, something similar could be done in humans. Neuroprivacy is the idea that we should have to give consent to anyone who wants access to our innermost selves. But there’s a question: Does neuroprivacy apply only to my unspoken thoughts? Or does it apply to the electrical activity in my brain?

OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will soon allow erotic and sexually explicit interactions for adult users. Erotic features aren’t just another product update; they deepen emotional dependency and encourage people to treat AI companions as partners rather than tools. This shift opens the door to what I call “intimate advertising” — a powerful new form of manipulation in which tech companies shape human desire and manipulate users for profit. AI has continual access to our anxieties, frustrations, desires, and secrets. It can understand how our minds work and detect when we are most vulnerable — and, therefore, most persuadable. What is particularly troubling is that this new form of advertising will come from entities that many will consider friends and life advisors. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 220 million times worldwide and are used regularly by over half of US teens. With intimate advertising, personal companionship becomes inseparable from businesses’ persuasion techniques. A system designed to comfort you can easily be repurposed to sell to you. The deeper AI companions embed themselves in our emotional lives, the more vital it becomes to draw a clear line between care and commerce. Before Big Tech turns intimacy into its most profitable advertising channel yet, we must press regulators to enforce the idea there are limits on how far we are willing to let AI into our private lives.

As more details come to light about Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire sex trafficker is increasingly suspected of having used his wealth, influence, and connections to shape the way political power is used, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. If true, what kind of foreign policy did he favor and what goals did he hope to achieve? Over the years, Epstein exchanged emails with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak opposing the Iran nuclear deal and favoring military action against Syria; expressed concern about Israel’s intensifying turn away from the two-state solution; and counseled Donald Trump adviser ... Steve Bannon on how the Trump administration could best take on this leading global rival of the United States. The country that featured most heavily in Epstein’s private discussions contained in the files wasn’t Israel; it was China. It was in his private chats with the virulently anti-China Bannon that the country most often came up, with Epstein often framing China as a serious threat that had to be defeated. Epstein bounced between certainty that China was falling apart and warnings that it was a formidable foe. China is “a unified nationalist economic country” whose forty-year-long strategy is “right on track,” Epstein told Bannon in July 2018. “My meeting the other day was around how these peasants looked into their own systems, found the NSA cybertools that we had inserted and then used them against us interests,” Epstein wrote [in another exchange].

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA’s role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report’s publication reveal. The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report’s significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country. Among the documents posted by the National Security Archive is a “secret/sensitive” options paper addressed to Dick Cheney, then chief of staff to Ford, that included a recommendation of outright opposition to publication of the report. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report’s historical significance had become more urgent. “Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we’ve come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders,” he said. At least 83 people have been killed in 21 US drone strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific since early September.

Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination. The Church Committee overcame intense pressure from the Gerald Ford White House to withhold publication of the report, which exposed CIA operations to “neutralize” leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and General Rene Schneider in Chile. “The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots,” states the introduction of the 285-page report, officially titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. “The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.” To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee report, the National Security Archive is posting a small selection of documents on efforts by the Ford Administration to keep the report secret. Public outrage forced the CIA and the White House to retreat on the use of assassination as a tool of covert operations. In response to the report, on February 18, 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which stated: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

Military aviation accidents are spiking. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D- Mass.) office reported this week, the rate of severe accidents per 100,000 flight hours, was a staggering 55% higher than it was in 2020. Her office said mishaps cost the military $9.4 billion, killed 90 service members and DoD civilian employees, and destroyed 89 aircraft between 2020 to 2024. The Air Force lost 47 airmen to “preventable mishaps” in 2024 alone. The U.S. continues to utilize aircraft with known safety issues or are otherwise prone to accidents, like the V-22 Osprey, whose gearbox and clutch failures can cause crashes. Dan Grazier, director of the Stimson Center’s National Security Reform Program, told RS that the lack of flight crew experience is a problem. “The total number of flight hours U.S. military pilots receive has been abysmal for years. Pilots in all branches simply don't fly often enough to even maintain their flying skills, to say nothing of improving them,” he said. This is often because aircraft are not ready to fly. “One of the main reasons behind the lack of flying time, is the simple fact that modern military aircraft are excessively complex machines that don't work as often as the services need them to do,” Grazier told RS. He said that popular aircraft, like the F-35, often are not mission capable. “Pentagon officials can ... insist on simpler aircraft with high readiness rates as a key performance parameter.”

November 30 marks the International Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides over southern Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Nearly two-thirds was Agent Orange, later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) — a potent, long-lasting dioxin. TCDD is a known human carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor, linked to cancers, reproductive disorders, and birth defects that can span generations. By the letter of the CWC, Agent Orange is not classified as a “chemical weapon.” If you ask a Vietnam veteran suffering from Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, or any of the 19 types of conditions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) associates with Agent Orange exposure, you’ll hear a very different story. To them, it was every bit a weapon designed to destroy life and health. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that over 757,000 veterans — about one in four who served — were receiving benefits linked to Agent Orange. The 2022 PACT Act broadened that circle to veterans who served in other areas where Agent Orange was used. By 2024, more than 84,000 new Vietnam-era veterans were granted compensation, many due to exposure. Fifty years after the Vietnam War ended, the toxic legacy of Agent Orange and other dioxins lingers on.

2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate. Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between. Some agencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without articulating an actual crime under investigation.

The first time Mike Martin held an AK-47 was after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. “My faith tradition is rooted in peace and non-violence,” he says. Martin took the AK-47 to a nearby blacksmith in Colorado Springs, dismantled it and forged the metal into a shovel and a rake. This moment sparked the beginning of RAWtools (War spelled backwards), a nonprofit Martin now runs full-time, and a movement spanning four states with affiliates in Buffalo, NY; Philadelphia, PA; and Asheville, North Carolina. Since its humble beginnings 14 years ago, RAWtools has destroyed and repurposed more than 6,000 guns, forging them into garden tools and art. Martin now carries the trigger of the first Kalashnikovs he destroyed on a keyring. For Martin, the physical act of destroying a gun can be healing, but often it’s just the beginning of a bigger conversation. “The dominant culture often tells us that we can’t escape the violence, so we should therefore join the violence,” he says. “Instead, this counter-story of turning swords into plows insists that violence is the problem, not the solution.” Anybody can fill out a form on the RAWtools website, or respond to the buyback program “Guns to Gardens,” and arrange to donate their gun. Donors often want to be involved in transforming the weapon into a force for good. RAWtools regularly holds events, especially in front of churches and synagogues, not only to collect and transform guns, but to start conversations.

Walking into Brightworks could be a shock for helicopter parents. The K-12 school is alive with invention, autonomy and what founder Gever Tulley calls “the energy of a big multi-generational family household.” Therefore there are no traditional grades or classes at Brightworks. Students are grouped into “bands” by interest and maturity, not by age. There are no teachers — just “collaborators,” and parents are invited to visit and join as they please. Agency is woven into every part of Brightworks’ ecosystem. Students move freely through the buildings. “The first instinct can’t be, ‘Where are you supposed to be?’” Tulley explains. “You have to assume they’re on a mission — maybe to grab a wrench from the shop or to take a walk. That’s part of the culture here.” Students can’t hide behind textbooks or screens; each semester, they must propose, plan and find collaborators for their own project — and eventually present it to the entire school, known as the “Brightworks family.” Tulley believes this kind of learning — driven by curiosity — pays off for life: “We see students as heroes on their own journey.” His aim is also to prepare kids for the future. “Twenty years from now, every industry will need small teams of highly specialized people solving complex problems,” he says — people who can also communicate and collaborate well. Brightworks graduates have been accepted at top-tier universities, including Harvard.

After a decade behind bars, it wasn’t the fields that stretched for kilometers around him that struck Nicolas when he first set foot on the farm. It was the smell. “I’ve been through six different jails and they all reeked. But you get used to it and forget it ever smelled bad — until you get out. Here, you can breathe in and out fully,” he says, gesturing to the light-stone buildings and tractor parked in the courtyard. Located in Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique, a small village in the north of France, the Moyembrie farm hosts inmates through a detention program run by a small nonprofit. Along with nine others, Nicolas came to spend the last stretch of his sentence beyond prison walls. At Moyembrie, time is served differently. There are no bars, no cells, and inmates can go into town during their time off. All staff are social workers directly employed by the farm — the first facility of its kind to receive a contract from the Ministry of Justice to host inmates. Residents work four hours each morning. They tend to vegetable plots, lead goats from the barn to the field, or cook meals shared in the common room. All inmates at the farm are able to pursue classes and training programs. Some are even run on-site by volunteers, like lessons for the driver’s license written exam. Nicolas, who has never had his driver’s licence, attends these every week, hoping it will help him secure a job. Over half of the inmates who go there are working or in training three months after release and all leave with stable accommodation.

Pedro Reyes says being Mexican is like living in an apartment where an upstairs neighbor has a leaking swimming pool. "Just what is leaking," says Reyes, "is hundreds of thousands of guns." Reyes believes art should address social issues like gun violence, even when they're difficult and controversial. "We have to be allowed to ask questions," he says. "If you are not allowed to ask questions, you are not free." Reyes also addresses the issue of gun violence in another way, by using guns themselves. His first project began in 2007 in the Mexican city of Culiacan. As part of a campaign to curb shootings, the city collected 1,527 guns. He used them to create art. "Those 1,527 guns were melted and made into the same number of shovels," he says. "So for every gun now, there's a shovel. And with every shovel, we planted a tree." Now Reyes is working on a new project. It is one that transforms guns into something more musical. An exhibition of the work is on display at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum. It's called "Disarm," and consists of guns that have been turned into musical instruments." To me at least," Pedigo says, "the concept is about taking weapons that are destructive in nature and chaotic and trying to make them for something else. So, instead of objects of destruction, they become objects of creation." That's exactly Reyes' point. Art, he says, is about transformation. "It's the same metal," he says, "but it is no longer a gun. It's now a flute or a guitar."

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