This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why conservationists are making rhinos radioactive Every year, poachers shoot hundreds of rhinos, fishing crews haul millions of sharks out of protected seas, and smugglers carry countless animals and plants across borders. This illegal activity is incredibly hard to disrupt, since it’s backed by sophisticated criminal networks and the perpetrators know that their chances of being caught are slim. With an annual value of $20 billion, according to Interpol, it’s the world’s fourth-most-lucrative criminal enterprise after trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people.The environmental guardians facing up to these nefarious networks—dispersed alliances of rangers, community groups, and law enforcement officers—have long been ill equipped and underfunded.Still, there is genuine hope that tech could help turn the tide—and prevent poaching at the source. Read the full story. —Matthew Ponsford
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land. 
Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. Want to lose weight? Get shredded? Stay mentally sharp? A wellness influencer might tell you to take peptides, the latest cure-all in the alternative medicine arsenal. They’re everywhere on social media, and that popularity seems poised to grow.The benefits and risks of many of these compounds, however, are largely unknown. Some of the most popular peptides have never been tested in human trials. They are sold for research purposes, not human consumption, and some are illegal knockoffs of wildly successful weight-loss medicines. That raises big questions about their safety and effectiveness, which are still unresolved. Read the full story. —Cassandra Willyard This story is part of MIT Technology Review Explains: our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. The human work behind humanoid robots is being hidden In January, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang proclaimed that we are entering the era of physical AI, when artificial intelligence will move beyond language and chatbots into physically capable machines. (He also said the same thing the year before, by the way.) The implication—fueled by new demonstrations of humanoid robots putting away dishes or assembling cars—is that mimicking human limbs with single-purpose robot arms is the old way of automation. The new way is to replicate the way humans think, learn, and adapt while they work. The problem is that the lack of transparency about the human labor involved in training and operating such robots leaves the public both misunderstanding what robots can actually do and failing to see the strange new forms of work forming around them.

Just as our words became training data for large language models, our movements are now poised to follow the same path. Except this future might leave humans with an even worse deal, and it’s already beginning. Read the full story. —James O’Donnell This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Anthropic has accused DeepSeek of using Claude to train its own model It claims three Chinese companies siphoned its data to help their systems catch up. (WSJ $)+ OpenAI made similar allegations against DeepSeek the other week. (CNN)+ DeepSeek’s latest model was reportedly trained on banned US Nvidia chips. (Reuters)2 Donald Trump’s global 10% tariff has come into effect But the US President is still hoping to increase it to 15%. (FT $)+ Tariffs are bad news for batteries. (MIT Technology Review)3 What the US stands to lose if China invades TaiwanAccess to crucial chips, for one. (NYT $)+ Apple is moving some of its Mac Mini production to Houston from Asia. (WSJ $)+ Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening. (MIT Technology Review)4 The UK’s first baby has been born using a womb transplanted from a dead donorIt’s positive news for people born without a womb that hope to give birth. (BBC)+ Everything you need to know about artificial wombs. (MIT Technology Review)5 Binance sent $1.7 billion to sanctioned Iranian entitiesIt comes after the crypto exchange promised to clean up its act in the wake of its founder being sent to prison. (NYT $)+ Binance fired workers who raised concerns about the transactions. (WSJ $) 6 ICE is using free walkie-talkie app Zello to communicateIt had previously been used by at least two of the January 6 insurrectionists. (404 Media)+ ICE has resurrected pandemic-style shelter in place orders. (Vox)
7 Meta built an app for teens, but never released itBell was supposed to bring high school classmates together, a court filing has revealed. (NBC News) 8 Battery storage is a rare US clean energy success storyThings are looking up for the sector, surprisingly. (Wired $)+ What a massive thermal battery means for energy storage. (MIT Technology Review)
9 How to play Tetris on the cover of a magazineIt’s a whole new way of looking at portable gaming devices. (The Verge)10 Meta’s director of AI safety allowed OpenClaw to accidentally delete her inboxA cautionary tale, if ever there was one. (TechCrunch)+ It wouldn’t stop, dispute her repeatedly ordering it to. (404 Media)+ Moltbook was peak AI theater. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “Shameless people stealing everyone’s data then complaining about other people stealing from them.” —AI researcher Timnit Gebru has little sympathy for Anthropic’s complaints that DeepSeek and other Chinese companies violated its terms by using Claude to train their models, she explains in a post on X.
One more thing How sounds can turn us on to the wonders of the universeAstronomy should, in principle, be a welcoming field for blind researchers. But across the board, science is full of charts, graphs, databases, and images that are designed to be seen.So researcher Sarah Kane, who is legally blind, was thrilled three years ago when she encountered a technology known as sonification, designed to transform information into sound. Since then she’s been working with a project called Astronify, which presents astronomical information in audio form.For millions of blind and visually impaired people, sonification could be transformative—opening access to education, to once unimaginable careers, and even to the secrets of the universe. Read the full story. —Corey S. Powell

Every year, poachers shoot hundreds of rhinos, fishing crews haul millions of sharks out of protected seas, and smugglers carry countless animals and plants across borders. This illegal activity is incredibly hard to disrupt, since it’s backed by sophisticated criminal networks and the perpetrators know that their chances of being caught are slim. With an annual value of $20 billion, according to Interpol, it’s the world’s fourth-most-lucrative criminal enterprise after trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people. The United Nations seeks to end trafficking in protected species by 2030. But the environmental guardians facing up to these nefarious networks—dispersed alliances of rangers, community groups, and law enforcement officers—have long been ill equipped and underfunded. A recent report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime found “no reason for confidence” that the 2030 target would be reached.  Still, there is genuine hope that tech could help turn the tide. Tools initially developed for cities and research facilities are increasingly moving into the planet’s wild places, allowing environmental agencies and self-motivated communities in both richer and poorer countries to step up their efforts to detect illegal goods, trace smuggling networks, and prevent poaching at the source.  In December, Interpol announced it had seized record numbers of live animals, thanks in part to a set of sophisticated tools that had helped to expose hidden networks behind trafficking. Its Operation Thunder 2025 coordinated law enforcement agencies from 134 countries and seized 30,000 live animals, from apes to butterflies, using a suite of technologies including digital forensics and AI-driven detection. “The success of Thunder 2025 shows that modern threats demand modern tools,” says José Adrián Sanchez Romero, an operations coordinator at Interpol’s environmental security subdirectorate. Here are five examples of technologies that are arming conservationists and others in the battle to end wildlife crime.  COURTESY OF THE RHISOTOPE PROJECT Tagging rhinos In July, a group of South African researchers announced they had won government approval for one of the most eyebrow-raising attempts to prevent wildlife crime: drilling radioactive substances into the horns of rhinoceroses. 
In an effort dubbed the Rhisotope Project, the group worked in 2024 and 2025 to fit 33 rhinos from Limpopo Rhino Orphanage in South Africa with pellets containing low-level radioactive isotopes. The project is supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Blood samples and veterinary exams have shown that the pellets don’t affect the health of the rhinos, the rangers, or the surrounding environment. But the isotope emits enough radiation for the horns to be detected by radiation portal monitors, devices that can scan cargo containers and vehicles to detect illicit sources of radiation. Eleven thousand such monitors are already in operation at airports and shipping terminals worldwide, in addition to thousands of personal monitors worn by border security. In November 2024, Rhisotope tested the system at New York airports and harbors in collaboration with the US Customs and Border Patrol. The group found that border guards could detect an individual horn the team had planted inside a full 40-foot shipping container.
The project was pioneered by James Larkin, director of the radiation and health physics unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Though the country is currently home to 15,000 rhinos, the majority of Africa’s total population, poachers have killed 10,000 rhinos there since 2007. In the past, the common approach to deterring poachers was to eliminate the part they’re seeking, preemptively cutting off the animal’s entire horn. But dehorning requires rhinos to be sedated for long periods, and it’s a stressful and costly process that must be repeated every 18 to 24 months, as rhino horns grow back. The act also renders rhinos less able to protect themselves, and they tend to withdraw from social interactions and competition for mates. The new approach is far less painful and time-consuming. Each dose costs 21,500 South African rand (about $1,300) per animal and remains active for five years. Warning signs along perimeter fences make it clear the animals have been tagged, helping to deter poachers.  Larkin, who spent his career as a nuclear safety expert, says he was initially wary when conservationists suggested to him that radioactive substances could help prevent rhino poaching, joking that he didn’t want to end up in jail if anyone got hurt. But he changed his mind when he realized there was a dose that would be harmless to bystanders while making the horns both worthless to smugglers and readily detectable. Poachers will kill a rhino for even a small amount of horn, which can fetch $60,000 per kilogram as an ingredient for traditional medicines. Adding isotopes, though, renders the horns potentially unsafe to consume, and it’s hard for smugglers to reverse: “It’s almost impossible to remove isotopes unless you are a skilled radiation protection officer who knows what they are looking for,” Larkin says. Even so, he’s tight-lipped about the compound the pellets are made from and what they look like: “I don’t want to help criminals,” he explains. The South African health agency has now approved Rhisotope to roll out the program across the country. “We have a goal ultimately to treat up to 500 rhinos a year,” says Jessica Babich, chief executive of the project. At the same time, the group is working to adapt its approach to other popular poaching targets—elephant tusks and pangolin scales—as well as trafficked plants like cycads.  COURTESY OF TARONGA CONSERVATION SOCIETY COURTESY OF TARONGA CONSERVATION SOCIETY Scanning signatures For many exotic pets, from birds to pythons, there are two parallel trades: a legal one in farmed or captive-bred animals and an illicit one in creatures taken from the wild. But faced with a lizard or a parrot, how can law enforcement know its origin story?
In Australia, some conservationists have been trying to follow the numbers. It’s very hard to breed the egg-­laying mammals known as short-beaked echidnas. US zoos have yielded only 19 echidna babies, or “puggles,” in a century of efforts. So Indonesia’s yearly export of dozens of “captive-bred” echidnas has long raised suspicions.  To address the issue, a team at Australia’s Taronga Conservation Society, led by Kate Brandis, has developed an x-ray fluorescence (XRF) gun that can analyze elemental signatures in keratin—the stuff of quills, feathers, and hair. Wild echidnas, for instance, forage for a diverse diet of beetle larvae, ants, and grubs, while captive animals tend to be raised on a low-diversity diet of commercial feed. Each of these dietary histories leaves a record in the mammals’ porcupine-like spines, which can be read with high accuracy using a handheld XRF gun. Similar evidence can be found in other species, like cockatoos, pangolins, and turtles, which the team has used to test the device.  There is certainly plenty more to be done: Australia, home to many unique species that live nowhere else on the planet, is a target for collectors from Asia, Europe, and the US. Brandis is targeting some of the species most often trafficked out of the country, including shingleback and blue-tongue lizards. Not long ago, Australian environmental authorities led a trial study at post offices across the country, using the XRF gun alongside AI-equipped parcel scanners, which Brandis’s team had trained to recognize concealed species in real time. The trial uncovered more than 100 legally protected lizards that were being shipped out of Australia; a distributor was sentenced to more than three years in jail. COURTESY OF SKYLIGHT AI COURTESY OF SKYLIGHT AI AI in the sky Commercial fishing, scuba diving, and oil exploration are all prohibited in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument near Hawaii, an expanse of the Pacific larger than all US national parks combined. It is just one of a number of vast marine protected areas that have emerged in recent years, along with global pacts to conserve 30% of Earth’s land and sea. 
But establishing these reserves is just one step. Enforcing their protection is another matter. And for many marine reserves—especially those in the Global South—there is no real way to do that, says Ted Schmitt, senior director of conservation at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Thousands of square kilometers of open ocean is a lot to monitor. Even with satellites scanning the marine areas, the reality until recently was that you had to know what you were looking for: “When you have the vastness of the ocean, you can have analysts who are very well trained, looking for vessels,” he says. Even then, there is little chance of finding wrongdoing without intelligence from the ground.  In 2017, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen began developing a tool called Skylight to provide analysts with more of that intelligence, using AI to help analyze satellite and ship-tracking data to detect suspicious behavior. The project moved to AI2 after Allen’s death in 2018, and the technology has since been adopted by more than 200 organizations in more than 70 countries. “We’re basically monitoring the entire ocean 24-7-365, and surfacing all these vessels,” says Schmitt.  To see how coast guards use the system, Schmitt points to a series of arrests in Panama in early 2025. That January, satellites found 16 boats about 200 kilometers off the coast inside the Coiba Ridge marine reserve, which serves as a migratory highway for sharks, rays, and large fish like yellowfin tuna. Skylight’s AI algorithms, trained to recognize the signature movements of various types of fishing, detected long-line fishing and requested higher-resolution images of the site from a commercial satellite flying overhead. The images and Skylight’s analysis were used by Panama’s environmental agency and military, which deployed ships and aircraft to the area, ultimately seizing six vessels and thousands of kilograms of illegally taken fish.  Skylight AI detects around 300,000 vessels per week, according to the company’s platform analytics. Stories like Coiba Ridge make clear that AI can benefit partners who are working tirelessly on the ground, says Schmitt: “The Panama case really was one of those ‘wow’ moments, not because the technology finally proved itself, but because the agencies that needed to operationalize it, and actually take it to a legal finish, did it.”
COURTESY OF WILDTECHDNA Rapid DNA tests When the conservation scientist Natalie Schmitt was researching snow leopards in remote areas of Nepal, she worked with people who could point out signs of these elusive big cats—often a pile of droppings. But the results weren’t reliable: Leopard scat can easily be confused with the poop of wolves and foxes, which share the same habitat and prey, she explains. What Schmitt wanted was a tool that could identify the animal involved, right on the spot—ideally by finding a way to sequence the DNA in the scat.  While some laboratories can take DNA samples of such material and identify species of interest, they are few and far between in rich countries and usually nonexistent in poorer countries, meaning that this process can be weeks long and involve shipping samples cross-country or across borders. This is a problem not just for field research but for wildlife trafficking enforcement. Imagine a border agent who has just opened a box of shark-like fins or a shipment of live parrots and needs to know whether the particular species is one that can legally be captured and transported. People in this situation don’t have weeks to spare. In 2020, Schmitt founded WildTechDNA, which has developed a DNA test that aims to do that work on the fly. The test, which is about as easy and fast as a home pregnancy test, employs a simple two-step process. First, a new extraction method—“Literally, put the sample in the extraction tube and squeeze 10 times,” she says—can cut the time it takes to pull DNA out of a sample from a day to about three minutes. Then, to actually test that DNA, the company took inspiration from the covid pandemic. The researchers found they could use technology similar to rapid at-home tests to identify whether the DNA in question belongs to a specific species: “Our tests use very simple lateral-flow strips to tell you whether a sample belongs to your target species of interest, yes or no.” The strips can be tailored to test for a wide range of targets, from big cats to microbes, opening up diverse applications in the wild. They can tell if samples of hair belong to a snow leopard, or if a frog has been infected with the fungi that cause chytridiomycosis, a disease that has devastated amphibians worldwide and wiped out at least 90 species.  WildTechDNA’s earliest adopter was the Canadian government, which wanted to detect European eels—a critically endangered species that is effectively impossible to identify by appearance. This confusion has allowed €3 billion of European eels to be smuggled each year, disguised as other eel species. Some of that passes into Canada on its way to suppliers in Japan and China, and in some cases on to Canadian restaurants and consumers. “When a shipment is suspected to contain European eel, they’ll randomly sample it and they’ll send those samples off to a lab across the country, which will take three weeks,” says Schmitt of traditional tracking methods. WildTechDNA developed tests specific to European eels and taught Canadian enforcement officers how to use them, so that they could launch a “nationwide European eel blitz,” she says. In a 2025 campaign, European eels turned up in fewer than 1% of shipments. Schmitt says Canadian authorities have not disclosed details about investigations but are encouraged by the results—significantly below the rates detected using older technologies in 2016, an improvement they attribute to better surveillance.
COURTESY OF RAINFOREST CONNECTION Listening in The world’s forests are increasingly filled with snooping devices. In addition to affordable camera traps and animal-mounted GPS tags, low-cost solar-powered microphones have proved to be strikingly effective at revealing what’s living in some of the planet’s most densely inhabited and biodiverse environments.  Rainforest Connection, a nonprofit founded by the physicist turned conservation-­tech entrepreneur Topher White in 2014, was a pioneer in bioacoustic monitoring for conservation. The group initially repurposed old phones into low-cost monitoring devices but has since developed a standardized device called the Guardian that has now been deployed in more than 600 locations. 
Guardians are designed to capture a broad soundscape of the rainforest: “They sit out in the rainforest for long periods of time, up in treetops. They’re solar-powered, they can last for years, and we listen to all the sounds continuously and transmit that up to the cloud, where we are then able to analyze it for all sorts of things,” says White. From the outset, the aim was to use these devices to pick up immediate threats—“chainsaws, logging trucks, gunshots, things like that,” White says—and relay real-time alerts to local partners, including police, Indigenous groups, and local communities that protect the land. COURTESY OF RAINFOREST CONNECTION COURTESY OF RAINFOREST CONNECTION Bioacoustic monitoring devices have rapidly advanced in recent years. Many can now analyze data before transmitting it, and they’ve become cheaper to make as batteries have gotten smaller. By today’s standards, Rainforest Connection’s sensors are “over-engineered,” says White. But having a large number of detectors already deployed means there is ample data that can be mined for signals beyond well-known red flags, like gunshots. “An area for a lot more innovation going forward is to use the soundscape itself as a detector,” White says. Rainforest Connection and the German software firm SAP tested this approach on the island of Sumatra and found they could identify human intruders by using machine learning to hunt for “uncharacteristic sudden changes to the soundscape.” For example, tracking animal calls—and noting when those animals go silent—could reveal the arrival of poachers. In 2026, Rainforest Connection will roll out this approach to reserves in Thailand, Jamaica, and Romania by building a unique model for each environment, trained on thousands of hours of audio and verified using camera traps. “We have a lot of eyes and ears in the forest already, all of which are aware and reacting to each other and to new stimuli,” White says. For the rest of us, Rainforest Connection’s unfiltered stream has another use: an app where you can listen to the livestream from the Ecuadorian rainforest, taking in the complete soundscape of birdsong, frog chatter, and cicada chirps. Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Want to lose weight? Get shredded? Stay mentally sharp? A wellness influencer might tell you to take peptides, the latest cure-all in the alternative medicine arsenal. People inject them. They snort them. They combine them into concoctions with superhero names, like the Wolverine stack.   Matt Kaeberlein, a longevity researcher, first started hearing about peptides a few years ago. “At that point it was mostly functional medicine doctors that were using peptides,” he says, referring to physicians who embrace alternative medicine and supplements. “In the last six months, it’s kind of gone crazy.” Peptides have gone mainstream. At the health-technology startup Superpower in Los Angeles, employees can get free peptide shots on Fridays. At a health food store in Phoenix, a sidewalk sign reads, “We have peptides!” At a tae kwon do center in South Carolina, a peptide wholesaler hosts an informational evening. On social media, they’re everywhere. And that popularity seems poised to grow; Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides.
The benefits and risks of many of these compounds, however, are largely unknown. Some of the most popular peptides have never been tested in human trials. They are sold for research purposes, not human consumption. Some are illegal knockoffs of wildly successful weight-loss medicines. The vast majority come from China, a fact that has some legislators worried. Last week, Senator Tom Cotton urged the head of the FDA to crack down on illegal shipments of peptides from China. In the absence of regulatory oversight, some people are sending the compounds they purchase off for independent testing just to ensure that the product is legit.  What is a peptide? A peptide is simply a short string of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. “Scientists generally think of peptides as very small protein fragments, but we don’t really have a precise cutoff between a peptide and a protein,” says Paul Knoepfler, a stem-cell researcher at the University of California, Davis. Insulin is a peptide, as is human growth hormone. So are some neurotransmitters, like oxytocin. 
But when wellness influencers talk about peptides, they’re often referring to particular compounds—formulated as injections, pills, or nasal sprays—that have become trendy lately.  Some of these peptides are FDA-approved prescription medications. GLP-1 medicines, for example, are approved to treat diabetes and obesity but are also easily accessible online to almost anyone who wants to use them. Many sites sell microdoses of GLP-1s with claims that they can “support longevity,” reduce cognitive decline, or curb inflammation.  Many more peptides are experimental. “The majority fall into the unapproved bucket,” says Kaeberlein, who is chief executive officer of Optispan, a Seattle-based health-care technology company focused on longevity. That bucket includes drugs that promote the release of growth hormones, like TB-500, CJC-1295, and ipamorelin, and compounds said to promote tissue repair and wound healing, like BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. It’s primarily these unapproved compounds that have raised concerns. “Anybody can set up an online shop selling research-grade peptides,” says Tenille Davis, a pharmacist and chief advocacy officer at the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, a trade organization representing more than 600 pharmacies. “And nobody knows what’s even in the vials.”   It’s not just fitness gurus, biohackers, and longevity fanatics who are taking these experimental drugs. Kaeberlein recalls hearing about an acquaintance whose doctor prescribed her unapproved peptides. She was “just a typical upper-middle-class woman,” he says. “That’s when it really hit me that this has sort of gone relatively mainstream.” What do peptides do? All kinds of things, purportedly. GHK-Cu is supposed to help with wound healing and collagen production. BPC-157 is said to promote tissue repair and curb inflammation, TB-500 to foster blood vessel formation. Here’s the caveat: The evidence for these benefits comes largely from animal studies and online testimonials, not human trials. “There’s no human clinical evidence to show that they even do what people are claiming that they do,” says Stuart Phillips, a muscle physiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “So it could be just a giant rip-off.” Some experimental peptides probably do have beneficial wound healing properties or regenerative effects, Kaeberlein says. For BPC-157, for example, “the animal data is compelling,” he says. But there are still plenty of unknowns: What is the right dosage? How long should you take it? What’s the best way to administer it? Those are questions that can be answered only through rigorous clinical trials. In the absence of those studies, doctors “just make up their own protocols,” he says. Some consumers go the DIY route, reconstituting powdered peptides and injecting their own concoctions at home.  So why am I seeing ads for these peptide therapies if they’re not approved?  Federal law prohibits companies from marketing medications that haven’t been approved. That includes most peptides, which are regulated as small molecules, not dietary supplements. (Two notable exceptions are collagen peptides and creatine peptides, often sold as powders.) The law is designed to protect consumers from drugs that haven’t been proved safe and effective. But it doesn’t stop labs from making peptides for research purposes. “Most of the peptides being consumed in the marketplace now are being sold by these online companies that are selling them labeled for research use only,” Davis says. The vials often bear disclaimers that clearly say as much: “For research use only” or “Not for human consumption.” It’s illegal to market these products for human use, but “the websites make it pretty clear that the buyers are intended to be using these products themselves,” she says.

The practice isn’t legal, but enforcement has been sporadic. “FDA sends warning letters, shuts down companies. But because it’s all online, they have a really hard time keeping up with these entities,” Davis says. And companies have plenty of incentive to keep illegally marketing the products. “They can make millions of dollars without having to spend money and time doing research,” Knoepfler says. “It’s a cash grab.” Compounding pharmacies, which are legally allowed to create bespoke medications by mixing bulk active ingredients, often get requests to dispense peptides, but most peptides don’t meet the eligibility criteria for compounding. This has always been the case, but in 2023 the FDA explicitly added several common experimental peptides to the list of bulk substances that cannot be compounded because of safety concerns. “It put an exclamation point on policy that was already in place,” Davis says.   Many GLP-1 medications are available from compounding pharmacies. That used to be accepted because the drugs were in short supply. Now, however, supplies of most of these medications are stable, and sellers are under increasing pressure from regulators to stop mass-marketing these drugs.  What’s the harm in trying them?  Peptides sold for research purposes come from labs with little regulatory oversight. “When you buy stuff online intended for research grade, you have no idea what’s in the vial that you’re getting. You have no idea the sterility practices that it was manufactured under, or what sort of impurities might be in the vial,” Davis says. Phillips has heard some people say they send their peptides for third-party testing to ensure that they’re pure, “like it’s some kind of flex,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you just proved that this stuff lives in the shadows, for crying out loud.’” Finnrick Analytics, a peptide-testing startup in Austin, Texas, has analyzed the purity and potency of more than 5,000 samples of 15 different peptides from 173 vendors. The results show that the quality varies substantially from vendor to vendor and even batch to batch. For example, the company tested nearly 450 samples of BPC-157 from 64 vendors. In some cases, the vials sold as BPC-157 didn’t contain the compound at all. In those that did, the purity varied from about 82% to 100%.  Perhaps more worrying, 8% of all the peptide samples Finnrick tested had measurable levels of endotoxins, bacterial fragments that can cause fever and chills or, in larger doses, septic shock.  The health risks aren’t just hypothetical. In 2025, two women had to be hospitalized and placed on ventilators after receiving peptide injections at a longevity conference in Las Vegas. Both recovered, and it’s still not clear whether they reacted to the peptides themselves or to some impurity in the vials. 
“The idea that all peptides are safe and all peptides are natural is just nonsense,” Kaeberlein says. “I tend to consider myself fairly libertarian when it comes to what people want to do for their health,” he adds. “If you want to take an experimental drug, that’s up to you.” But the problem with unregulated experimental therapies is that it’s exceedingly difficult to assess benefit and harm. “The relatively small percentage of people that are bad actors will be bad actors, and they will dishonestly market this stuff to people who aren’t equipped to really understand the true risks and rewards,” he says. And, like any drug, peptides come with a risk of side effects. For approved medications, these are detailed right on the package insert. But for many experimental peptides, there hasn’t been enough research to understand what those side effects might be. Some researchers have warned that peptides that promote growth or blood vessel formation might also foster the growth of cancers.  
For competitive athletes who use peptides, meanwhile, the risks include not just possible health problems but suspension. Some peptides, like BPC-157, are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.  The FDA has undergone a pretty substantial overhaul under the Trump administration. Are the regulations around peptides likely to change?  I don’t have a crystal ball, but it seems likely. In May 2025, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the longevity enthusiast and biohacker Gary Brecka on his podcast The Ultimate Human and promised to “end the war at FDA against alternative medicine—the war on stem cells, the war on chelating drugs, the war on peptides.” Knoepfler anticipates that Kennedy will force the FDA to allow compounding of some of the most popular peptides, like BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. “Such a step would put public health at great risk, while giving compounders and likely wellness influencers a lot more profit,” he says.  The FDA seems intent on cracking down on GLP-1 copycats, however. In early February, commissioner Marty Makary posted on X that the agency would take “swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In January, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the head of the world’s most valuable company, proclaimed that we are entering the era of physical AI, when artificial intelligence will move beyond language and chatbots into physically capable machines. (He also said the same thing the year before, by the way.) The implication—fueled by new demonstrations of humanoid robots putting away dishes or assembling cars—is that mimicking human limbs with single-purpose robot arms is the old way of automation. The new way is to replicate the way humans think, learn, and adapt while they work. The problem is that the lack of transparency about the human labor involved in training and operating such robots leaves the public both misunderstanding what robots can actually do and failing to see the strange new forms of work forming around them. Consider how, in the AI era, robots often learn from humans who demonstrate how to do a chore. Creating this data at scale is now leading to Black Mirror–esque scenarios. A worker in Shanghai, for example, recently spent a week wearing a virtual-reality headset and an exoskeleton while opening and closing the door of a microwave hundreds of times a day to train the robot next to him, Rest of World reported. In North America, the robotics company Figure appears to be planning something similar: It announced in September it would partner with the investment firm Brookfield, which manages 100,000 residential units, to capture “massive amounts” of real-world data “across a variety of household environments.” (Figure did not respond to questions about this effort.)
Just as our words became training data for large language models, our movements are now poised to follow the same path. Except this future might leave humans with an even worse deal, and it’s already beginning. The roboticist Aaron Prather told me about recent work with a delivery company that had its workers wear movement-tracking sensors as they moved boxes; the data collected will be used to train robots. The effort to build humanoids will likely require manual laborers to act as data collectors at massive scale. “It’s going to be weird,” Prather says. “No doubts about it.”  Or consider tele-operation. Though the endgame in robotics is a machine that can complete a task on its own, robotics companies employ people to operate their robots remotely. Neo, a $20,000 humanoid robot from the startup 1X, is set to ship to homes this year, but the company’s founder, Bernt Øivind Børnich, told me recently that he’s not committed to any prescribed level of autonomy. If a robot gets stuck, or if the customer wants it to do a tricky task, a tele-operator from the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, will pilot it, looking through its cameras to iron clothes or unload the dishwasher.
This isn’t inherently harmful—1X gets customer consent before switching into tele-operation mode—but privacy as we know it will not exist in a world where tele-operators are doing chores in your house through a robot. And if home humanoids are not genuinely autonomous, the arrangement is better understood as a form of wage arbitrage that re-creates the dynamics of gig work while, for the first time, allowing physical tasks to be performed wherever labor is cheapest. We’ve been down similar roads before. Carrying out “AI-driven” content moderation on social media platforms or assembling training data for AI companies often requires workers in low-wage countries to view disturbing content. And despite claims that AI will soon enough train on its outputs and learn on its own, even the best models require an awful lot of human feedback to work as desired. These human workforces do not mean that AI is just vaporware. But when they remain invisible, the public consistently overestimates the machines’ actual capabilities. That’s great for investors and hype, but it has consequences for everyone. When Tesla marketed its driver-assistance software as “Autopilot,” for example, it inflated public expectations about what the system could safely do—a distortion a Miami jury recently found contributed to a crash that killed a 22-year-old woman (Tesla was ordered to pay $240 million in damages).  The same will be true for humanoid robots. If Huang is right, and physical AI is coming for our workplaces, homes, and public spaces, then the way we describe and scrutinize such technology matters. Yet robotics companies remain as opaque about training and tele-operation as AI firms are about their training data. If that does not change, we risk mistaking concealed human labor for machine intelligence—and seeing far more autonomy than truly exists.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon Chicago has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates.  That’s among the highest numbers per capita in the US. Chicago boasts one of the largest license plate reader systems in the country, and the ability to access audio and video surveillance from independent agencies such as the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Park District, and the public transportation system as well as many residential and commercial security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras.Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. 
But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech. Read the full story. —Rod McCullom
Job titles of the future: Breast biomechanic Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn’t diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help. A professor of biomechanics, Wakefield-Scurr thought she could do a little research and find a science-backed option. Two decades later, she’s still looking.Wakefield-Scurr now leads an 18-person team at the Research Group in Breast Health at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. And as more women take up high-impact sports, the need to understand what makes a good bra grows, she says her lab can’t keep up with demand. Read the full story. —Sara Harrison These stories are both from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.  The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside ICE’s plans to build huge detention centers across the USThe identities of the personnel who authorized it have been revealed in metadata. (Wired $)+ A UK tourist with a valid visa was detained by ICE for six weeks. (The Guardian) 2 The UAE says it was targeted by a wave of AI-backed cyberattacksAuthorities said the attacks marked a major shift in methods, but didn’t elaborate. (Bloomberg $)+ New cybersecurity rules are hobbling small defense suppliers. (Reuters)+ AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. (MIT Technology Review)3 What does the public really think about AI?Tech leaders are worried they might not be fully onboard with their missions. (NYT $)+ How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism. (MIT Technology Review) 4 It looks like X really is pushing its users further to the rightAs well as attracting more conservative thinkers in the first place. (NY Mag $)+ The platform is currently disputing a major European fine. (Politico $)5 Meet the farmers standing up to data center buildersThey’re turning down deals worth millions for the land they’ve worked for decades. (The Guardian)+ A data center venture launched at the White House isn’t delivering on its promises. (The Information $)+ Data centers are amazing. Everyone hates them. (MIT Technology Review) 6 America has a plan to fight back against China’s AIIt hopes to send Tech Corps volunteers around the world to promote its own national efforts. (Rest of World)+ China’s plan to lure in new AI customers? Bubble tea. (FT $)+ The State of AI: Is China about to win the race? (MIT Technology Review) 7 Clouds are a major climate problem ☁️They’re making it harder for scientists to model the weather accurately. (Quanta Magazine)+ The building legal case for global climate justice. (MIT Technology Review) 8 AI is still hopeless at reading PDFsBut companies keep deploying it across work systems anyway. (The Verge) 9 A “Fitbit for farts” could help analyze your gastrointestinal healthIf you don’t mind wearing a sensor tucked into your underwear, that is. (WSJ $)10 Gen Z is fascinated by corporate culture ​​💼TikTok’s “WorkTok” videos are very effective at romanticizing the daily grind. (FT $) 
Quote of the day “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, compares the environmental impact of training AI’s vast models to the effort required to train a human during an event in India, TechCrunch reports. One more thing How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidiesOn a pine farm north of the tiny town of Tamarack, Minnesota, Talon Metals has uncovered one of America’s densest nickel deposits—and now it wants to begin extracting it.If regulators approve the mine, it could mark the starting point in what the company claims would become the country’s first complete domestic nickel supply chain, running from the bedrock beneath the Minnesota earth to the batteries in electric vehicles across the nation.MIT Technology Review wanted to provide a clearer sense of the law’s on-the-ground impact by zeroing in on a single project and examining how these rich subsidies could be unlocked at each point along the supply chain. Take a look at what we found out. —James Temple
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Alysa Liu’s gold medal-winning Winter Olympics figure skating route is truly amazing.+ Mmm, delicious ancient Roman pizza.+ It’s not every day you find 2,000 year-old footprints while walking your dog 👣+ Nature is full of surprises, and so are the winners of this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.

Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train was the scene of a random and horrific mass shooting. Four people were shot and killed on a westbound train as it approached the suburb of Forest Park.  The police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras in the city.  The process began with a quick review of the transit agency’s surveillance cameras, which captured the alleged gunman shooting the victims execution style. Law enforcement followed the suspect, through real-time footage, across the rapid-­transit system. Police officials circulated the images to transit staff and to thousands of officers. An officer in the adjacent suburb of Riverdale recognized the suspect from a previous arrest. By the time he was captured at another train station, just 90 minutes after the shooting, authorities already had his name, address, and previous arrest history. Little of this process would come as much surprise to Chicagoans. The city has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates. That’s among the highest numbers per capita in the US. Chicago boasts one of the largest license plate reader systems in the country, and the ability to access audio and video surveillance from independent agencies such as the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Park District, and the public transportation system as well as many residential and commercial security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras.  Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech.  Black and Latino communities in Chicago have historically been targeted by excessive policing and surveillance, says Lance Williams, a scholar of urban violence at Northeastern Illinois University. That scrutiny has created new problems without delivering the promised safety, he suggests. In order to “solve the problem of crime or violence and make these communities safer,” he says, “you have to deal with structural problems,” such as the shortage of livable-wage jobs, affordable housing, and mental-health services across the city.
Recent years have seen some effective pushback against the surveillance. Until recently, for example, the city was the largest customer of ShotSpotter acoustic sensors, which are designed to detect gunfire and alert police. The system was introduced in a small area on the South Side in 2012. By 2018, an area of about 136 square miles—some 60% of the city—was covered by the acoustic surveillance network. Critics questioned ShotSpotter’s effectiveness and objected that the sensors were installed largely in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Those critiques gained urgency with the fatal shooting in March 2021 of a 13-year-old, Adam Toledo, by police responding to a ShotSpotter alert. The tragedy became the touchstone of the #StopShotSpotter protest movement and one of the major issues in Brandon Johnson’s successful mayoral campaign in 2023. When he reached office, Johnson followed through, ending the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the San Francisco Bay Area company behind ShotSpotter. In total, it’s estimated the city paid more than $53 million for the system. 
In response to a request for comment, SoundThinking said that ShotSpotter enables law enforcement “to reach the scene faster, render aid to victims, and locate evidence more effectively.” It stated the company “plays no part in the selection of deployment areas” but added: “We believe communities experiencing the highest levels of gun violence deserve the same rapid emergency response as any other neighborhood.”  While there has been successful resistance to police surveillance in the nation’s third-largest city, there are also countervailing forces: governments and officials in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs are moving to expand the use of surveillance, also in response to public pressure. Even the victory against acoustic surveillance might be short-lived. Early last year, the city issued a request for proposals for gun violence detection technology.  Many people in and around Chicago—digital privacy and surveillance activists, defense attorneys, law enforcement officials, and ordinary citizens—are part of this push and pull. Here are some of their stories.  Alejandro Ruizesparza and Freddy MartinezCofounders, Lucy Parsons Labs Oak Park, a quiet suburb at Chicago’s western border, is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. It includes the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings and homes.  Until recently, the village of Oak Park was also the center of a three-year-long campaign against an unwelcome addition to its manicured lawns and Prairie-style architecture: automated license plate readers from a company called Flock Safety. These are high-speed cameras that automatically scan license plates to look for stolen or wanted vehicles, or for drivers with outstanding warrants.  Freddy Martinez (left) and Alejandro Ruizesparza (right) direct Lucy Parsons Labs, a charitable organization focused on digital rights.AKILAH TOWNSEND An Oak Park group called Freedom to Thrive—made up of parents, activists, lawyers, data scientists, and many others—suspected that this technology was not a good or equitable addition to their neighborhood. So the group engaged the Chicago-based nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs to help navigate the often intimidating process of requesting license plate reader data under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Lucy Parsons Labs, which is named for a turn-of-the-century Chicago labor organizer, investigates technologies such as license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and police bodycams.  LPL provides digital security and public records training to a variety of groups and is frequently called on to help community members audit and analyze surveillance systems that are targeting their neighborhoods. It’s led by two first-­generation Mexican-Americans from the city’s Southwest Side. Alejandro Ruizesparza has a background in community organizing and data science. Freddy Martinez was also a community organizer and has a background in physics. 
The group is now approaching its 10th year, but it was an all-volunteer effort until 2022. That’s when LPL received its first unrestricted, multi-year operational grant from a large foundation: the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known worldwide for its so-called “genius grants.” A grant from the Ford Foundation followed the next year.  The additional resources—a significant amount compared with the previous all-volunteer budget, acknowledges Ruizesparza—meant the two cofounders and two volunteers became full-time employees. But the group is determined not to become “too comfortable” and lose its edge. There is a tenacity to Lucy Parsons Labs’ work—a “sense of scrappiness,” they say—because “we did so much of this work with no money.”  One of LPL’s primary strategies is filing extensive FOIA requests for raw data sets of police surveillance. The process can take a while, but it often reveals issues.  In the case of Oak Park, the FOIA requests were just one tool that Freedom to Thrive and LPL used to sort out what was going on. The data revealed that in the first 10 months of operation, the eight Flock license plate readers the town had deployed scanned 3,000,000 plates. But only 42 scans led to an alert—an infinitesimal yield of 0.000014%. 
At the same time, the impacts of those few flagged license plates were disproportionate. While Oak Park’s population of about 53,000 is only 19% Black, Black drivers made up 85% of those flagged by the Flock cameras, seemingly amplifying what were already concerning racial disparities in the village’s traffic stops. Flock did not respond to a request for comment. “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.” Freddy Martinez, cofounder, Lucy Parsons Labs LPL brings a mix of radical politics and critical theory to its mission. Most surveillance technologies are “largely extensions of the plantation systems,” says Ruizesparza.  The comparison makes sense: Many slaveholding communities required enslaved persons to carry signed documents to leave plantations and wear badges with numbers sewn to their clothing. The group says it aims to empower local communities to push back against biased policing technologies through technical assistance, training, and litigation—and to de­mystify algorithms and surveillance tools in the process. “When we talk to people, they realize that you don’t need to know how to run a regression to understand that a technology has negative implications on your life,” says Ruizesparza. “You don’t need to understand how circuits work to understand that you probably shouldn’t have all of these cameras embedded in only Black and brown regions of a city.”
The group came by some of its techniques through experimentation. “When LPL was first getting started, we didn’t really feel like FOIA would have been a good way of getting information. We didn’t know anything about it,” says Martinez. “Along the way, we were very successful in uncovering a lot of surveillance practices.”  One of the covert surveillance practices uncovered by those aggressive FOIA requests, for example, was the Chicago Police Department’s use of “Stingray” equipment, portable surveillance devices deployed to track and monitor mobile phones.  The contentious issue of Oak Park’s license plate readers was finally put to a vote in late August. The village trustees voted 5–2 to terminate the contract with Flock Safety.  Since then, community-­based groups from across the country—as far away as California—have contacted LPL to say the Chicago collective’s work has inspired their own efforts, says Martinez: “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.” Brian Strockis Chief, Oak Brook Police Department If you drive about 20 miles west of Chicago, you’ll find Oakbrook Center, one of the nation’s leading luxury shopping destinations. The open-air mall includes Neiman-Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci and attracts high-end shoppers from across the region. It’s also become a destination for retail theft crews that coordinate “smash and grabs” and often escape with thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory that can be quickly sold, such as sunglasses or luxury handbags.  In early December, police say, a Chicago man tried to lead officers on what could have been a dangerous high-speed chase from the mall. Patrol cars raced to the scene. So did a “first responder drone,” built by Flock Safety and deployed by the Oak Brook Police Department.   The drone identified the suspect vehicle from the mall parking lot using its license plate reader and snapped high-definition photos that were texted to officers on the ground. The suspect was later tracked to Chicago, where he was arrested.  Brian Strockis, chief of the Oak Brook Police Department, led the way in introducing drones as first responders in the state of Illinois.AKILAH TOWNSEND This was the type of outcome that Brian Strockis, chief of the Oak Brook Police Department, hoped for when he pioneered the “drone as first responder,” or DFR, program in Illinois. A longtime member of the force, he joined the department almost 25 years ago as a patrol officer, worked his way up the brass ladder, and was awarded the top job in 2022. 
Oak Brook was the first municipality in Illinois to deploy a drone as a first responder. One of the main reasons, says Strockis, was to reduce the number of high-speed chases, which are potentially dangerous to officers, suspects, and civilians. A drone is also a more effective and cost-efficient way to deal with suspects in fleeing vehicles, says Strockis. Police say there was the potential for a dangerous high-speed chase. Patrol cars raced to the scene. But the first unit to arrive was a drone. “It’s a force multiplier in that we’re able to do more with less,” says the chief, who spoke with me in his office at Oak Brook’s Village Hall. 
The department’s drone autonomously launches from the roof of the building and responds to about 10 to 12 service calls per day, at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It arrives at crime scenes before patrol officers in nine out of every 10 cases. Next door to Village Hall is the Oak Brook Police Department’s real-time crime center, a large room with two video walls that integrates livestreams from the first-responder drone, handheld drones, traffic cameras, license plate readers, and about a thousand private security cameras. When I visited, the two DFR operators demonstrated how the machine can fly itself or be directed to locations from a destination entered on Google Maps. They sent it off to a nearby forest preserve and then directed it to return to the rooftop base, where it docks automatically, changes batteries, and charges. After the demo, one of the drone operators logged the flight, as required by state law. Strockis says he is aware of the privacy concerns around using this technology but that protections are in place.  For example, the drone cannot be used for random or mass surveillance, he says, because the camera is always pointed straight ahead during flight and does not angle down until it reaches its desired location. The drone’s payload does not include facial recognition technology, which is restricted by state law, he says.  The drone video footage is invaluable, he adds, because “you are seeing the events as they’re transpiring from an angle that you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to.”  It’s an extra layer of protection for the public as well as for the officers, says the chief: “For every incident that an officer responds to now, you have squad car and bodycam video. You likely have cell-phone video from the public, officers, complainants, from offenders. So adding this element is probably the best video source on a scene that the police are going to anyway.” Mark Wallace Executive director, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras Mark Wallace wears several hats. By day he is a real estate investor and mortgage lender. But he is probably best known to many Chicagoans—especially across the city’s largely African-American communities on the South and West Sides—as a talk radio host for the station WVON and one of the leading voices against the city’s extensive network of red-light and speed cameras.  For the past two decades, city officials have maintained that the cameras—which are officially known as “automated enforcement”—are a crucial safety measure. They are also a substantial revenue stream, generating around $150 million a year and a total of some $2.5 billion since they were installed.
Urged on by a radio listener, Mark Wallace started organizing against Chicago’s red-light and speed cameras, a substantial revenue stream for the city that has been found to disproportionately burden majority Black and Latino areas.AKILAH TOWNSEND “The one thing that the cameras have the ability to do is generate a lot of money,” Wallace says. He describes the tickets as a “cash grab” that disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities. A groundbreaking 2022 analysis by ProPublica found, in fact, that households in majority Black and Latino zip codes were ticketed at much higher rates than others, in part because the cameras in those areas were more likely to be installed near expressway ramps and on wider streets, which encouraged faster speeds. The tickets, which can quickly rack up late fees, were also found to cause more of a financial burden in such communities, the report found. These were some of the same concerns that many people expressed on the radio and in meetings, Wallace says.  Chicago’s automated traffic enforcement began in 2003, and it became the most extensive—and most lucrative—such program in the country. About 300 red-light cameras and 200 speed cameras are set up near schools and parks. The cost of the tickets can quickly double if they are not paid or contested—providing a windfall for the city.   Wallace began his advocacy against the cameras soon after arriving at the radio station in the early 2010s. A younger listener called in and said, he recalls, “that he enjoyed the information that came from WVON but that we didn’t do anything.” The comment stuck with him, especially in light of WVON’s storied history. The station was closely involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and broadcast Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches during his Chicago campaign. Wallace hoped to change the caller’s perception about the station. He had firsthand experience with red-light cameras,  having been ticketed himself, and decided to take them on as a cause. He scheduled a meeting at his church for a Friday night, promoting it on his show. “More than 300 people showed up,” he remembers, chatting with me in the spacious project studio and office in the basement of his townhouse on the city’s South Side. “That said to me there are a lot of people who see this in­equity and injustice.”  Wallace began using his platform on WVON—The People’s Show—to mobilize communities around social and economic justice, and many discussions revolved around the automated enforcement program. The cause gained traction after city and state officials were found to have taken thousands of dollars from technology and surveillance companies to make sure their cameras remained on the streets. Wallace and his group, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras, want to repeal the ordinances authorizing the city’s camera programs. That hasn’t happened so far, but political pressure from the group paved the way for a Chicago City Council ordinance that required public meetings before any red-light cameras are installed, removed, or relocated. The group hopes for more restrictions for speed cameras, too. “It was never about me personally. It was about ensuring that we could demonstrate to people that you have power,” says Wallace. “If you don’t like something, as Barack Obama would say, get a pen and clipboard and go to work to fight to make these changes.”  Jonathan Manes Senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center Derick Scruggs, a 30-year-old father and licensed armed security guard, was working in the parking lot of an AutoZone on Chicago’s Southwest Side on April 19, 2021. That’s when he was detained, interrogated, and subjected to a “humiliating body search” by two Chicago police officers, Scruggs later attested. “I was just doing my job when police officers came at me, handcuffed me, and treated me like a criminal—just because I was near a ShotSpotter alert,” he says. The officers found no evidence of a shooting and released Scruggs. But the next day, the police returned and arrested him for an alleged violation related to his security guard paperwork. Prosecutors later dismissed the charges, but he was held in custody overnight and was then fired from his job. “Because of what they did,” he says, “I lost my job, couldn’t work for months, and got evicted from my apartment.” Jonathan Manes litigated cases related to detentions at Guantanamo Bay and the legality of drone strikes before turning his attention to Chicago’s implementation of gunshot detection technology.AKILAH TOWNSEND Scruggs is believed to be among thousands of Chicagoans who’ve been questioned, detained, or arrested by police because they were near the location of a ShotSpotter alert, according to an analysis by the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General. The case caught the attention of Jonathan Manes, a law professor at Northwestern and senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, a public interest law firm.  Manes previously worked in national security law, but when he joined the justice center about six years ago, he chose to focus squarely on the intersection of civil rights with police surveillance and technology. “My goal was to identify areas that weren’t well covered by other civil rights organizations but were a concern for people here in Chicago,” he says.  “There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it.” Jonathan Manes, senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center And when he and his colleagues looked into ShotSpotter, they revealed a disturbing problem: The system generated alerts that yielded no evidence of gun-­related crimes but were used by police as a pretext for other actions. There seemed to be “a pattern of people being stopped, detained, questioned, sometimes arrested, in response to a ShotSpotter alert—often resulting in charges that have nothing to do with guns,” Manes says.  The system also directed a “massive number of police deployments onto the South and West Sides of the city,” Manes says. Those regions are home to most of Chicago’s Black and Latino residents. The research showed that 80% of the city’s Black population but only 30% of its white population lived in districts covered by the system.  Manes brought Scruggs’s case into a lawsuit that he was already developing against the city’s use of ShotSpotter. In late 2025, he and his colleagues reached a settlement that prohibits police officers from doing what they did in Scruggs’s case—stopping or searching people simply because they are near the location of a gunshot detection alert.  Chicago had already decommissioned ShotSpotter in 2024, but the agreement will cover any future gunshot detection systems. Manes is carefully watching to see what happens next. Though Manes is pleased with the settlement, he points out that it narrowly focused on how police resources were used after the gunshot detection system was operational. “There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it,” he adds. He supports laws that require disclosure from local officials and law enforcement about what technologies are being proposed and how civil rights could be affected.   More than two dozen jurisdictions nationwide have adopted surveillance transparency laws, including San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York City. But so far Chicago is not on that list.  Rod McCullom is a Chicago-based science and technology writer whose focus areas include AI, biometrics, cognition, and the science of crime and violence.