Access Now

Access Now is the largest globally distributed digital-rights organisation in the make-AI-good movement's terms — a 501(c)(3) non-profit headquartered in New York with regional offices in Brussels, San José (Costa Rica), Berlin, Tunis, Delhi, Nairobi, and Manila, more than 130 staff across five continents, and a programme footprint that runs from a multi-language 24/7 digital-security helpline for at-risk users through the world's largest annual digital-rights summit (RightsCon) to the principal civil-society coalition mobilising against state-ordered internet shutdowns (#KeepItOn). The organisation's self-description — that it "defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk" — is the working framing for its position in the movement: the rights-and-technology specialist that operates everywhere national digital-rights organisations operate, knits their work together through coalition infrastructure, and supplies the regional and multilateral institutions with civil-society inputs they would not otherwise receive.

Founding and structure

Access Now was founded in July 2009 in California by Brett Solomon, Cameran Ashraf, Sina Rabbani, and Kim Pham as an emergency-response volunteer team of technologists during the contested June 2009 Iranian presidential election and the protests of the Green Movement that followed, working — in the organisation's own retrospective phrasing — to help Iranians "get back online" and disseminate video footage out of the country during the regime's crackdown on protest communications. The originating crisis-response posture is load-bearing for what the organisation became: the 24/7 helpline that supports activists, journalists, and human-rights defenders facing cyber threats traces directly to the 2009 emergency-response work, and the geographic distribution of the staff team — Tunis, Nairobi, Manila, Delhi alongside the Brussels and New York policy hubs — reflects an organisational design built around the proposition that the people most affected by digital-rights violations are not in the same time zones or languages as the European and North American policy institutions that set the rules. Access Now is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in California with its headquarters relocated to New York City in 2022, and it holds registered legal personalities in Belgium, Costa Rica, and the United States.

The organisation's seven regional-centre structure — Africa, Asia Pacific, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, and North America — is run out of the eight named operational offices and through staff distributed across five continents. Brett Solomon led the organisation for fifteen years as Executive Director from the 2009 founding through 19 July 2024; Chief Operating Officer Joe Steele served as interim Executive Director through the transition; and on 1 October 2024 Alejandro Mayoral Baños — founder and former Executive Director of the Indigenous Friends Association, founder and President of Magtayaní, and an Ashoka Fellow recognised for work on Indigenous Peoples and digital technologies — succeeded Solomon as Executive Director. Board Co-Chair Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist on press-freedom and human rights and a 2014 Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellow appointed to the board in October 2017 alongside Donna McKay (Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights) and Bruce Schneier (the security technologist and Berkman Klein Center fellow), framed the transition statement on the board's behalf.

Programme areas

Access Now's published programme structure runs four interlocking lines of work that together cover the rights-and-technology field at a breadth no other single organisation in the movement attempts.

The Digital Security Helpline has operated continuously since 2009 and was formally launched in 2013 as a 24/7 multi-language service: it provides direct security support — incident response, account-compromise mitigation, secure-communications guidance, threat assessment — to activists, journalists, civil-society organisations, and human-rights defenders facing cyber threats, harassment campaigns, and state-actor targeting. The service operates in nine languages, has handled more than 10,000 cases, and is one of the corpus's clearest examples of a global civil-society organisation operating direct-service infrastructure rather than only advocacy.

RightsCon is the annual flagship summit Access Now has convened since the 2011 inaugural in Silicon Valley, framed by the summit series as "the world's leading summit on human rights in the digital age" and the principal global meeting at which civil-society, technologists, government, and platform actors negotiate the rights-and-technology field face-to-face. The location rotation deliberately alternates between Silicon Valley and Global South cities — Rio de Janeiro 2012, Manila 2015, Brussels and Toronto 2017–2018, Tunis 2019, Costa Rica 2022, and most recently Taipei in February 2025, the 13th edition and a return to East Asia after a decade away. The 2022 Costa Rica edition drew 9,329 participants from 162 countries — the high-water mark for digital-rights convenings — and the 2025 Taipei edition drew more than 3,000 in-person participants across over 500 sessions in 18 tracks, run jointly with Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs at the Taipei International Convention Center. RightsCon's importance in the corpus's terms is structural rather than thematic: it is the place at which much of the international civil-society digital-rights field actually meets each other.

The Grants Program has distributed more than $6.1 million to 124 grantees by 2021 — small grants supporting digital-rights organising at the national and local level, particularly in regions of the field underserved by foundation funding. And Policy and Advocacy is the line of work that runs across regional centres on encryption, biometric surveillance, AI and human rights, internet shutdowns, platform accountability, content moderation, and the rights-and-technology agenda at the UN, the African Union, the Inter-American system, the EU institutions, and bilateral foreign-policy tracks.

#KeepItOn

Access Now's signature campaign in the corpus's terms is the #KeepItOn coalition, launched at RightsCon Silicon Valley in 2016 by nearly 70 founding civil-society organisations — including the Association for Progressive Communications, Bytes for All, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Hivos, iFreedom Uganda, Internews, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, and Paradigm Initiative Nigeria — and now uniting more than 366 national, international, regional, and local organisations across over 100 countries. The coalition's working definition of an internet shutdown — "an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information" — was itself adopted at the 2016 RightsCon launch and has since become the reference definition used by UN special rapporteurs and parliamentary inquiries. The coalition's tactics combine grassroots advocacy, direct policy-maker engagement, technical and digital-security support during shutdowns, corporate-accountability pressure on telecommunications providers, and legal intervention in domestic and regional courts.

The Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) — the campaign's verified dataset of documented internet shutdowns — anchors the annual #KeepItOn report that has become the field's reference baseline. The 2025 annual report, released on 31 March 2026, documented at least 313 shutdowns implemented in 52 countries in 2025 — the highest number recorded in any year since the campaign began tracking. The campaign also runs the #KeepItOn Election Watch programme on election-period shutdowns and the #NoExamShutdown initiative against shutdowns ordered during national exam periods. Access Now's public framing is that internet shutdowns are now a recognisable pattern of authoritarian governance whose suppression value depends on civil-society silence about them; the coalition's working theory of change is that documentation, attribution, and coordinated international response can raise the political cost of ordering shutdowns enough to deter them.

EU AI Act and biometric surveillance

Access Now has been one of a small number of organisations working the European Commission, Parliament, and Council tracks on the EU AI Act from the 2021 proposal through the 2024 adoption, despite its non-European headquarters. The organisation was a named co-drafter of the 30 November 2021 joint civil-society statement "An EU Artificial Intelligence Act for Fundamental Rights" — alongside European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Panoptykon Foundation, epicenter.works, AlgorithmWatch, the European Disability Forum, Bits of Freedom, Fair Trials, PICUM, and ANEC — and remained inside the EDRi-coordinated coalition through to the 12 July 2023 trilogue-stage joint statement signed by 150 organisations and co-drafted with EDRi, AlgorithmWatch, Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, EFN, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, the European Disability Forum, Fair Trials, Homo Digitalis, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the Panoptykon Foundation, and PICUM. Access Now was also one of the twelve original civil-society organisations in the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face coalition against biometric mass surveillance in European public space, launched in October 2020. On UK live facial recognition, Access Now co-signed the 6 October 2023 cross-party joint statement coordinated by Big Brother Watch and signed by 65 cross-party parliamentarians and 31 rights and race-equality organisations — Access Now placed as the 28th of the 31 signatory organisations on the demand for an immediate halt to UK police and private-business live facial-recognition deployments.

Funding and independence

Access Now's financial-transparency page names a deliberately diversified funder base: foundation funders including the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Luminate Group, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust; government donors including Global Affairs Canada, the German Federal Foreign Office, the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the foreign ministries of Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida); and named technology-company supporters including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, NordVPN, and the Mozilla Corporation. The organisation's published position is that independence, diversity, and sustainability of funding "are central to Access Now's ability to carry out its mission", and that it refuses support whose acceptance "could compromise organisational independence, staff safety, or relationships with partners and communities" — a question the organisation's regional offices field constantly given the geographic overlap between its operating geography and the operating geography of the platform companies it engages with.

Posture in the movement

Access Now's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is the breadth: it is the corpus's clearest example of an organisation that combines national and regional civil-society advocacy with global coalition coordination, direct-service infrastructure for at-risk users, and the convening function that brings the rights-and-technology field together each year. The geographic distribution — Tunis as the MENA and African anchor, Nairobi as the East African anchor, Delhi for South Asia, Manila for Southeast Asia, San José for Latin America and the Caribbean, Berlin and Brussels for European policy, and New York for North America and the UN system — is structurally distinct from the European-network or US-national models that dominate the rest of the corpus's organisational coverage. In coalition terms, Access Now sits as the international counterpart to EDRi in Brussels, to AlgorithmWatch in Berlin, to Big Brother Watch and Foxglove in the UK, and to Derechos Digitales in Latin America — supplying the international coordination layer that converts national civil-society wins into regional or global precedents and pressing the cross-border tactical work (internet-shutdown response, RightsCon convening, helpline support) that national organisations cannot run alone. Its rights-and-technology working theory of change is that the make-AI-good agenda is inseparable from the wider digital-rights agenda — that the same field of biometric surveillance, encryption, platform accountability, content moderation, and state-vs-citizen contests over digital communications is where AI rules are made, contested, and enforced — and that the civil-society infrastructure for the AI debate has to be at the geographic and institutional scale of the technology it is trying to govern.