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. 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 and Bruce Schneier, had served as Board Co-Chair and framed the October 2024 transition statement on the board's behalf. In January 2026, Geybulla joined as Co-Executive Director alongside Mayoral Baños under a co-leadership model adopted by the Board to balance strategic and operational workloads amid narrowing funding pools and rising authoritarianism — the organisation's own framing for the structural pressures facing international civil-society operations in the current period.

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 2023, and most recently Taipei in February 2025, the 13th edition and a return to East Asia after a decade away. The 2022 online 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. The planned 2026 edition — Lusaka, Zambia — was effectively cancelled on 28 April 2026 when Zambia's Ministry of Technology and Science announced an abrupt postponement without prior consultation. Access Now stated publicly that the cause was Chinese diplomatic pressure: PRC diplomats had pressed the Zambian government to exclude Taiwanese civil society participants and moderate specific topics as conditions for proceeding — conditions Access Now refused to accept. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the action as an act of transnational repression. In response, Access Now convened the RightsCon Continues Summit, a 24-hour online event on 22–23 September 2026 featuring fireside chats, strategy sessions, and community storytelling around resilience and multistakeholder action. 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, and the Zambia cancellation illustrated that in sharp relief — the summit's inclusion of Taiwanese civil society was itself a target of state-level interference.

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 370 member organisations across 106 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.

In August 2026 the campaign marked its tenth anniversary — having grown from 70 founding organisations in 2016 to more than 370 across 106 countries, with documented shutdowns increasing more than 300 percent over the same period. The anniversary programme included the launch of the interactive exhibit "Sound of the Silenced" on 18 August 2026, participation at FIFAfrica26 in late September, and a #KeepItOn coalition fireside chat at the RightsCon Continues Summit on 22 September 2026.

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.

Alongside this EU advocacy, Access Now co-drafted and launched the global #BanBS (Ban Biometric Surveillance) coalition letter on 7 June 2021 — an open letter calling for outright prohibition of facial recognition and remote biometric recognition technologies in publicly accessible spaces, co-drafted with Amnesty International, EDRi, Human Rights Watch, the Internet Freedom Foundation, and IDEC, drawing more than 200 civil-society organisational signatories from 55 countries and remaining active as a global coordination anchor as of 2025–2026.

When the EU AI Act was voted by the European Parliament on 13 March 2024, Access Now assessed the adopted text as "a failure for human rights, a victory for industry and law enforcement." Senior Policy Analyst Daniel Leufer stated that "EU officials boast about being global trendsetters when it comes to regulating AI, but with this law they've set the lowest bar possible." The specific criticisms were that the Act fails "to properly ban some of the most dangerous uses of AI, including systems that enable biometric mass surveillance and predictive policing": an Article 6(3) developer self-exemption clause allows providers to opt themselves out of high-risk AI obligations; law enforcement and migration authorities are exempt from public transparency requirements for high-risk systems; and the national security carve-out was expanded beyond what EU treaty provisions allow. Access Now's stated posture after adoption was to "push for the strongest possible implementation of the AI Act and the few rights-protecting tools it includes, while continuing to monitor and call out AI-facilitated abuses."

With the Act's prohibited-practice provisions entering into effect on 2 February 2025, Access Now coordinated a 16 January 2025 joint statement with 20 other civil-society organisations — including Amnesty International, Privacy International, AlgorithmWatch, Article 19, and EDRi — calling on the Commission AI Office to ensure implementation guidelines maximise fundamental-rights protection. Specific demands on biometric surveillance included: interpreting facial image scraping bans broadly to prevent Clearview AI-style loopholes; clarifying that biometric categorisation prohibitions cover ethnicity and gender-identity inferences; extending predictive policing bans to migration control risk-assessment systems; and requiring minimum 24-hour delays before retrospective remote biometric identification use. In August 2025, Access Now submitted a formal consultation response to the Commission on high-risk AI system classification guidelines, addressing the interplay between prohibited practices, high-risk classification, and general-purpose AI systems, and maintaining that fundamental rights must be the central guiding basis for meaningful enforcement.

AI in warfare

In June 2026, Access Now co-led a joint statement on AI in warfare alongside Amnesty International, with 137 organisations and 165 individuals signing — including employees at Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and other major technology firms. The statement called on technology companies to refrain from entering into or fulfilling contracts with military agencies involved in possible violations of international law, to stop providing AI decision-support systems for military targeting and kill chains, and to halt sales of multimodal AI models for military use until accountability measures and guarantees of meaningful human control exist. States are called on to end AI deployment in military targeting operations and to provide transparency on current military AI applications. The statement specifically named Israeli military AI systems — Lavender, Gospel, and Where's Daddy — as examples of AI accelerating targeting decisions to speeds that make meaningful human control structurally impossible, alongside Palantir's Maven Smart System and large-language-model deployments through United States Department of Defense contracts. Access Now's central contention is that "frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons" and that the opacity of these systems fundamentally threatens the possibility of attributing moral or legal responsibility when errors occur.

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.