Newsletter: RightsCon Disruption a Wake-Up Call To Counter China's Authoritarian Influence

Good morning!

I had anticipated writing this edition of the newsletter from Lusaka, Zambia, where like so many others in the Tech Policy Press community I was scheduled to attend RightsCon. For me, RightsCon is one of the most important events of the year: a chance to reconnect with others in the field from across the world; to catch up on the latest research and advocacy on issues at the intersection of tech, democracy, and human rights; and to get a sense of what’s next.

But with some already en route, conference organizer Access Now was forced to announce that RightsCon "will not proceed" after Zambian government officials said they would postpone the conference in order to “ensure full alignment with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest considerations.”

By the end of the week, reports emerged that Chinese diplomats pressured Zambia over the participation of Taiwanese delegates who were traveling to the conference. China has substantial leverage over Zambia as a major creditor and investor in its infrastructure. For instance, China funded the construction of the conference center where RightsCon was set to take place.

Michael Caster, head of the Global China Program at ARTICLE 19, says RightsCon’s cancellation should inspire a reckoning with China’s influence and the growing reach of its efforts to repress its critics. He says “global civil society should redouble efforts at engagement and empowerment of Taiwanese civil society through inclusion at global gatherings,” and that more scrutiny must be given to China’s role and presence at other multistakeholder gatherings. “The world’s remaining liberal democracies must expand their efforts to meet the moment, or risk ceding more of the globe to Chinese-style authoritarianism,” he writes.

Following the news, I heard from many folks who shared their concerns about what this set of events means for the field and for the fight for democracy and human rights more generally, and we plan to share more on the implications next week.

Another thing the Zambian government might have wanted to avoid is criticism of its own repressive digital policies. Chilombo Mukena, a Zambian lawyer and fellow at the Global Network Initiative, writes that Zambia's new cyber legislation permits warrantless interception, lacks data safeguards, and broadens “law enforcement officer” to anyone designated by the President. “All stakeholders, and especially, and unfortunately, those who planned to attend RightsCon this year, should be aware of this framework and use the current circumstances as an opportunity to engage with local actors to push for the strengthening of human rights safeguards,” she writes in a piece highlighting how RightsCon’s cancellation underscores the unpredictable context in which these laws operate.

Finally, I had hoped to learn so much more about tech policy matters in Africa on the trip. One person that has educated me on the subject is Liz Orembo, a research fellow at Research ICT Africa. This week, she writes that in Africa, the space for information is shrinking, not so much because information is scarce, but because governments undemocratically control information infrastructure. Two recent elections — in Ghana in December 2024 and Tanzania in October 2025 — offer case studies, she says.

There is a great deal more on the site this week:

Surveillance, privacy & civil liberties

• Kaitlin Bender-Thomas, a politics reporter for the Medill News Service, reports that the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether geofence warrants — used to sweep up location data from tech companies — violate the Fourth Amendment. The case raises important questions about how far law enforcement can go in accessing sensitive digital data.
• Claudia Ruiz, senior civil rights policy advisor at UnidosUS, writes that the data broker loophole allows agencies to buy personal data without a warrant. As Congress weighs FISA 702 and AI use, she calls for reforms that would require a court order before agencies can purchase sensitive data.
• Jake Laperruque, Tech Policy Press fellow, provides analysis of the oral argument in Chatrie v. United States and the justices' probing of geofence warrants, the third-party doctrine, and whether sweeping location data searches are overbroad — or can be meaningfully limited under the Fourth Amendment. “The Court’s ruling in Chatrie could have ramifications far beyond geofence warrants,” he writes.
• The European Commission must finalize how Google anonymizes search data for rivals by July, and a US court-ordered technical committee is set to recommend privacy safeguards later this year. Paul Francis, director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and Andreas Dewes, privacy engineer at DuckDuckGo, argue that privacy and utility aren't a tradeoff — and show their work.
• Vas Panagiotopoulos, Tech Policy Press fellow, reports that a number of commercial spyware companies have sought to influence government by hiring lobbying, law, and PR firms. In part two of our spyware lobbying series, he takes a closer look at their efforts. “Although the picture is far from complete, our ‘spyware lobbying’ series offers a rare snapshot of these companies’ efforts to influence political decision-making in pursuit of their commercial interests,” he writes.
• Private digital credentials are reshaping identity verification. CJ Larkin, a McCourt School of Public Policy student and a Tech and Public Policy Scholar at Georgetown University, and Renée DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, map the landscape of private digital credentials, examining key players, technologies, risks, and what's next for privacy and trust.
• James Görgen, advisor at the Ministry of Development, Industry, Foreign Trade and Services of Brazil, writes that no government genuinely committed to national sovereignty would tolerate a foreign company operating within sensitive public systems while declaring explicit allegiance to another nation. He queries what Palantir is doinginside Brazil.

AI policy

• Paul Nemitz, visiting professor of law at the College of Europe, writes that if OpenAI genuinely wants to "keep people first" it should reverse its opposition to binding AI safety legislation, support mandatory transparency for data center energy and water usage, and endorse structural reforms to give workers and communities real power in the AI economy.
• T.J. Pyzyk, senior vice president and AI policy lead at Capstone LLC, writes that US AI policy is at a crossroads: strong-arm tactics versus standards leadership. Without a “center of gravity” as the internet had, strong-arming firms won't work. The real prize is shaping interoperability standards — before someone else builds the architecture, he argues. “The institutions, protocols, and norms taking shape today will determine how AI is governed and who is best situated to capture its value creation for decades,” he writes.
• In this week's podcast episode, Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo speaks with Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and the author of two reports on the 'gig-ification' of nursing, to dig into how AI is reshaping the profession from the inside out. Listen here.
• Catch up on what happened in US tech policy in April with a roundup from Freedman Consulting’s Rachel Lau and Shirley Frame and Tech Policy Press’s Ben Lennett, including a new push for a national privacy framework and continued debate in Congress and the courts over government surveillance.

AI & language diversity

We were lucky to have three related pieces on this subject this week:

• Sushant Kumar, founder and CEO of Kalpa Impact, and Ananya Mukherjee, consultant at Kalpa Impact, write that most AI models are trained in English — but only a small percentage of India's 1.4 billion people speak it. India's Bhashini is building sovereign AI infrastructure for Indic languages to close the digital divide, write Kumar and Mukherjee, who are external consultants to the project.
• Aliya Bhatia, policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, Marlena Wisniak, head of digital at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Jhalak M. Kakkar, executive director at the Centre for Communication Governance, and Dhanaraj Thakur, head of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the George Washington University Law School, write that for commitments made at the India AI Impact Summit to be more than a box-checking exercise, more collaboration and resourcing is needed to ensure evaluations of AI models meaningfully advance multilingual systems.
• In the real world, we resist letting outsiders define values or make meaning for local communities. Why accept it from AI? Sujata Mukherjee, senior director of trust & safety product management at Upwork, and Sasha Maria Mathew, global head of the platform policy team at Bumble, make the case for semantic ownership. “True interoperability in AI will not come from a forced global consensus, but from a common technical protocol that allows diverse cultural purposes to communicate without erasing one another,” they write.

EU digital regulation

• Zuzanna Warso, director of research at Open Future, writes that the EU is celebrating one year of its AI Continent Action Plan: €1 billion earmarked for AI but the same target was set in 2018. When facing pressure that Europe is 'falling behind,' repackaging is the instrument available, she writes.
• Hannah Ruschemeier, who holds the Chair for Public Law and Law of Digitalisation at the University of Osnabrück, writes that the European Commission's current ‘Omnibus’ proposal for the ‘simplification’ of EU digital regulation perfectly illustrates that AI hype has now arrived at the heart of European lawmaking. “Through substantial influence over the production of regulatory knowledge, Big Tech seeks to achieve epistemic capture of the EU regulation process, showing how hype can dismantle public expertise,” she writes in a piece written as part of our ongoing Hype Studies series.
• Megan Kirkwood, a researcher and writer specializing in issues related to competition and antitrust, explores the EU's first formal review of the Digital Markets Act, unpacking why future enforcement will focus on strengthening existing rules rather than broadening the law's scope despite calls to expand obligations to cover AI and cloud computing.
• Brussels says Meta's risk assessment of under-13 access is "incomplete and arbitrary." The preliminary findings landed alongside a same-day push to accelerate the EU age verification app rollout, as the EU intensifies child safety enforcement, reports Ramsha Jahangir, senior editor at Tech Policy Press.

UK digital policy

• Mark Scott, contributing editor at Tech Policy Press and senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy and Tech Initiative, writes that the UK's Online Safety Act faces an early test in the country's upcoming elections, highlighting a divide between Ofcom's powers to tackle systemic risks and growing pressure to act on potentially harmful content.
• Jessica Pandian, senior policy and communications officer at INQUEST, writes that under the banner of addressing prison overcrowding, the UK is accelerating efforts to develop and deploy surveillance tech to monitor people in the community, effectively outsourcing criminal justice to private technology firms. “Rather than accepting the construction of digital prisons as an inevitability, the UK must organize itself to resist the encroachment of Big Tech in criminal justice,” she writes.

What we're watching

We’re excited to share that Tech Policy Press is a media partner for the 2026 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection (CPDP) conference taking place in Brussels from May 19 - 22.

At a time of great challenges to democracies globally, Tech Policy Press seeks to advance a pro-democracy movement in tech and tech policy. CPDP is one of the few global forums where the intersection of technology and democracy is in focus: bringing together regulators, researchers, civil society, and other industry voices to grapple with the hardest questions in privacy, data protection, and digital governance.

This year's theme — Competing Visions, Shared Futures — speaks directly to the moment. Democratic societies are navigating real tensions: between innovation and accountability, between national sovereignty and global standards, between the promises of AI and the protections people are owed. A decade on from the GDPR, the question isn't just what we've built — it's whether the frameworks we have are equal to the democratic stakes ahead.

We're pleased to help bring these conversations to a wider audience by reporting from the conference this month. We hope to see you there!

I wish you the best for the week ahead!

Justin