Encode Justice North Carolina

Encode Justice North Carolina (EJNC) is the North Carolina state chapter of Encode Justice, the youth-led international AI-policy advocacy organization founded by Sneha Revanur in 2020. The chapter is based primarily in the Research Triangle Park area and is open to any North Carolina–based high school or college student interested in working on AI policy. As of EFF's June 2024 Electronic Frontier Alliance spotlight on the chapter, it was led by a chapter head identified publicly only as "Siri M."

Place in the Encode Justice network

EJNC is one of more than forty U.S. state chapters that constitute Encode Justice's distributed student-organizing layer. It is one of three Encode chapters — alongside the Oregon and Georgia chapters — that joined the Electronic Frontier Alliance, EFF's grassroots civil-liberties network. EFA itself concluded on 20 November 2025 after nearly a decade of operation, so the alliance relationship is now historical, but the EFA affiliation gave the chapter visibility inside the wider U.S. digital-rights coalition and a peer network of community organizations during the chapter's formative period.

Activities

The chapter runs three lines of work that mirror the national Encode model at the state and local level:

• Educational workshops. EJNC has run workshops on AI in policing and surveillance in partnership with Paving Tomorrow, a national youth civic-engagement group.
• Policy memos. The chapter has produced memos on the state legislative landscape and broader tech-policy questions, intended to make the legislative terrain legible to student organizers and to support the chapter's lobbying work.
• Legislative campaigns at the city and state level. The chapter lobbied the Cary, North Carolina, city council to pass an ACLU model bill on police surveillance and lobbied the North Carolina state legislature on a bill addressing social-media addiction and youth data privacy. It has also gathered student testimonials on school-based surveillance to ground its arguments in named North Carolina experience.

Stated next-phase priorities, as of the EFF spotlight, include campaigns on facial recognition and on the surveillance impact on immigrant communities, with the chapter framing its growth target as "expanding our reach while gaining new members in more regions of NC" and broadening the topical scope of its campaigns.

Local partners

EFF names three named local partners for the chapter: Emancipate NC, a North Carolina criminal-justice and racial-justice advocacy organization; Paving Tomorrow, the youth civic-engagement group that has co-run the AI-in-policing workshops; and BSides RDU, a Research Triangle–area information-security community. The mix — racial-justice advocacy, civic-engagement youth group, security-community meetup — is characteristic of how the chapter positions itself: an AI-policy chapter that recruits across surveillance, civil-liberties, and technical-community networks rather than only within student-policy circles.

Posture in the movement

EJNC is a clear in-scope local group for the corpus: a youth-led, geographically anchored chapter of an in-corpus national organization that engages non-AI publics — North Carolina high school and college students, residents of municipalities affected by police-surveillance procurement, and adjacent civil-liberties and racial-justice communities — in shaping how AI is built and deployed at the state and city level. Its distinctive contribution inside the Encode Justice network, as documented to date, is the early integration with the Electronic Frontier Alliance peer network and the explicit pairing of educational workshops with concrete city-council lobbying, rather than only national or federal advocacy. The chapter is also one of the corpus's first toeholds in U.S. state-level coverage outside the major coastal tech hubs.