This Week In Cyberspace

Tetiana Avdieieva is a Senior Legal Counsel at Digital Security Lab in Ukraine. She’s also a member of the Expert Committee on Artificial Intelligence under the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. She co-authored the media law reform in Ukraine and is currently engaged in AI governance processes both in Ukraine and on the Council of Europe level. Woah! What a glittery interview.

Lia Holland isfrom Fight for the Future, a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists fighting for a future where technology is a force for liberation— not oppression. An organization focused on technology and the rules governing it, fighting at the intersection of technology and human rights.

E-ling Chiu is theExecutive Director at Amnesty International Taiwan. where RightsCon2025 is currently underway. She is also a Board Member on the Human Rights Network for Tibet and Taiwan. We talk with her about some of the issues facing this small island including cable cutting, the death penalty and the impact of having such a powerful neighbour as China just across the Taiwan Strait.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, where he teaches international human rights law and international humanitarian law. David works at the intersection of technology, freedom of speech and democratic deliberation. He was also the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression up until 2020. 

He shares his insights into the state of the United States and the implications of the "mindless pillage" on the rest of the world.

Aymen Zaghdoudi is Access Now’s Middle East and North African Senior Policy Counsel.  He is also an assistant Professor at the Institute of Press and Information Sciences in Tunisia where he teaches Press law, Media regulation, and Constitutional law. He shares stories of dissent from his experience on the ground in Tunisia.

Betsy Popken is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law where she directs the Climate Justice program, and leads a team that’s conducting human rights impact assessments and evaluations of General large language models.

She speaks with us about how digitalisation is disrupting traditional warfare around the world.

Antonio Zappulla is CEO at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and in 2022 he was knighted as an Officer of the Italian Republic for “merit acquired in the fields of public service, and social, philanthropic and humanitarian activities” under the OMRI order, the highest-ranking honour of the Italian Republic.

We talk with him about LGBTQ rights in the digital age and how to protect NGOs from legal challenges at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei.

Natalia Krapiva is the tech-legal Counsel with Access Now. Prior to that she worked as a prosecutor at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. She's been fighting NSO Group to try to limit the sale and use of spyware for many years and  last December set a precedent with a win against this Israeli cyber-intelligence firm in the California court.

We talk to her about this and the state of digital forensics. As she says "it's a game of cat and mouse."

Taiwan has endured the world’s longest Marshall Law - 37 years - under Chinese rule.

Kuan-Ju Chou is from the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and she is at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei.

It's the first time in a decade that the conference has been held in South East Asia and activists are building connections and solidarity.

One of the featured thought leaders at the opening ceremony of RightsCon 2025 was Htaike Htaike Aung.

She’s the Executive Director at Myanmar Internet Communication Technologies for Development Organization  or MIDO, and she spoke with us about some of the challenges faced by citizens in a country that has endured four years of a military coup and 83 internet shutdowns.