2026-03-17 21:00:05
Every time you unlock your smartphone or start your connected car, you are generating a trail of digital evidence that can be used to track your every move.
In Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, just published by NYU Press, law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson exposes how the Internet of Things has quietly transformed into a vast surveillance network, turning our most personal devices into digital informants. The following excerpt explores the concept of “sensorveillance,” detailing the specific mechanisms—such as Google’s Sensorvault, geofence warrants, and vehicle telemetry—that allow law enforcement to repurpose consumer technology into powerful tools for investigation and control.
A man walked into a bank in Midlothian, Va., his black bucket hat pulled low over dark sunglasses. He handed a note to the teller, brandished a gun, and walked away with US $195,000. Police had no leads—but they knew that the robber had been holding a smartphone when he entered the bank. Guessing that the smartphone, like most smartphones, had some Google-enabled service running, police ordered Google to turn over information about all the phones near the bank during the holdup. In response to a series of warrants, Google produced information about 19 phones that had been active near the bank at the time of the robbery. Further investigation directed the police to Okelle Chatrie, who was ultimately charged with the crime.
Cathy Bernstein had a tough time explaining why her own car reported an accident to police. Bernstein had been driving a Ford equipped with 911 Assist, which was automatically enabled when she struck another vehicle. Rather than stick around to trade insurance information, she sped away. But her smart car had registered the bump—and called the police dispatcher, leading to a fairly awkward conversation:
Computer-Generated Voice: Attention, a crash has occurred. Line open.
911 Operator: Hello. Can anyone hear me?
Unidentified Woman: Yes, yes.
911 Operator: Okay. This is 911. You’ve been involved in an accident.
Unidentified Woman: No.
911 Operator: Well, your car called in to us because it said you’d been involved in an accident. Are you sure everything’s okay?
Unidentified Woman: Everything’s okay.
911 Operator: Okay. Are you broke down?
Unidentified Woman: No, I’m fine. The guy that hit me—he did not turn.
911 Operator: Okay, so you have been involved in an accident.
Unidentified Woman: No, I haven’t.
911 Operator: Did you hit a car?
Unidentified Woman: No, I didn’t.
911 Operator: Did you leave the scene of an accident?
Unidentified Woman: No. I would never do anything like that.
Apparently, Bernstein did do something “like that.” She was soon caught and cited for leaving the scene of the accident. Her own car provided evidence of her guilt.
Once upon a time, our things were just things. A bike was a tool for biking. It got you from one location to another, but it didn’t “know” more about your travels than any other inanimate object did. It was dumb in a comforting way, and we used it as intended. Today, a top-of-the-line bike can track your route and calculate your average speed along the way. Hop on an e-bike from a commercial bike share, and it will collect data for your trip, plus the trips of everyone else who used it that month.
These “smart” objects belong to what technologist Kevin Ashton named the Internet of Things. Ashton proposed adding radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and sensors to everyday objects, allowing them to collect data that could be fed into networked systems without human intervention. A sensor in a river could monitor the cleanliness of the water. A tag on a bottle of shampoo could trace its journey throughout the supply chain. Add enough sensors to enough objects and you can model the health of an entire ecosystem—or learn whether you’re sending too much of your inventory to Massachusetts and too little to Texas.
Ashton first theorized the Internet of Things (IoT) in the late 1990s. Today, the IoT goes well beyond his initial vision, including not only RFID tags but also sensors with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and GPS connections. These small, low-cost sensors record data about movement, heat, pressure, or location and can engage in two-way communication.
Of course, such a system is also, by necessity, a system of surveillance. “Sensorveillance”—a term I created to highlight the intersection of sensors and surveillance—is slowly becoming the default across the developed world.
Let’s start with phones. You’re probably not surprised that your cellphone company tracks your location; that’s how cellphones work. Both smartphones and “dumb” mobile phones use local cell towers, owned by cellphone companies, to connect you to your friends and family, which means those companies know which towers you are near at all times.
If you always carry your phone with you, your phone’s whereabouts—recorded as cell-site location information (CSLI)—reveal yours. One man, Timothy Carpenter, found this out the hard way after he and a group of associates set out to rob a series of electronics stores. Carpenter was the alleged ringleader, but he didn’t enter the stores himself. He served as the lookout, waiting in the car while his associates stuffed merchandise into bags.
It might have been hard for investigators to tie him to the crimes—if not for the fact that every minute he kept watch, his cellphone was pinging a local tower, logging his location. Using that information, the FBI was able to determine that he had been near each store during the exact moment of each robbery.
Cell signals are the tip of the proverbial data iceberg. If you have a smartphone, you’re almost certainly using something created by Google. Google makes money off advertising. The more Google knows about users, the better it can target ads to them. Google’s location services are on all Android phones, which use the company’s operating system, but they’re also on Google apps, including Google Maps and Gmail.
For years, all that location information ended up in what the company called the Sensorvault. The Sensorvault, as the name suggests, combined data from GPS, Bluetooth, cell towers, IP addresses, and Wi-Fi signals to create a powerful tracking system that could identify a phone’s location with great precision. As you might imagine, police saw it as a digital evidence miracle. In 2020, Google received more than 11,500 warrants from law enforcement seeking information from the Sensorvault.
“Sensorveillance”—a term I created to highlight the intersection of sensors and surveillance—is slowly becoming the default across the developed world.
In 2024, Google announced that it would no longer retain all of this data in the cloud. Instead, the geolocation information would be stored on individual devices, requiring police to get a warrant for a specific device. The demise of the Sensorvault came about through a change in corporate policy, which could be reversed. But at least for now, Google has made it significantly harder for police to access its data.
And while the Sensorvault was the biggest source of geolocational evidence, it is far from the only one. Even apps that have nothing to do with maps or navigation might nonetheless be collecting your location data. In one Pennsylvania case, prosecutors learned that a burglar used an iPhone flashlight app to search through a home, and they used the data from the app to prove he was in the home at the time of the break-in. These apps might be advertised as “free,” but they come with a hidden cost.
Cars, increasingly, collect almost as much information as phones. Mobile extraction devices can collect digital forensics about a car’s speed, when its airbags deployed, when its brakes were engaged, and where it was when all that happened. If you connect your phone to play Spotify or to read out your texts, then your call logs, contact lists, social media accounts, and entertainment selections can be downloaded directly from your vehicle. Because cars are involved in so many crimes (either as the instrument of the crime or as transportation), searches of this data are becoming more commonplace.
Even without physically extracting information from the car, police have other ways to get the data. After all, the car’s built-in telemetry system is sharing information with third parties. In addition to the usual personal information you give up when buying a car (name, address, phone number, email, Social Security number, driver’s license number), when you own a Stellantis-brand car, the company collects how often you use the car, your speed, and instances of acceleration or braking. Nissan asserts the right to collect information about “sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic [data]” in addition to “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.” Nissan’s privacy policy specifically reserves the right to provide this information to both data brokers and law enforcement.
The fact that government agents can glean so much information from our things does not mean that they should be able to do so at any time or for any reason. The U.S. Fourth Amendment—drafted in an era without electricity—protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects” against unreasonable search and seizure, but is naturally silent on the question of location data.
The first question is whether the data from our smart things should be constitutionally protected from police. In the language of the constitutional text, the smart device itself is an “effect”—a movable piece of personal property. But what about the data collected by the effect? Is the location data collected by your smartwatch considered part of the watch, or part of the person wearing the watch? Neither? Both?
To its credit, the U.S. Supreme Court has addressed some of the hard questions around digital tracking. In two cases, the first involving GPS tracking of a car and the second involving the CSLI tracking of Timothy Carpenter’s cellphone, the court has placed limits on the government’s ability to collect location data over the long term.
United States v. Jones involved GPS tracking of a car. Antoine Jones owned a nightclub in Washington, D.C. He also sold cocaine and found himself under criminal investigation for a large-scale drug distribution scheme. To prove Jones’s connection to “the stash house,” police placed a GPS device on his wife’s Jeep Cherokee. This was before GPS came standard in cars, so the device was physically attached to the undercarriage of the vehicle.
Data about Jones’s travels was recorded for 28 days, during which he visited the stash house multiple times. The prosecutors introduced the GPS data at trial, and Jones was found guilty. Jones appealed his conviction, arguing that the warrantless use of a GPS device to track his car violated his Fourth Amendment rights.
“When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance.” — the Supreme Court
In 2012, the Supreme Court held that a warrant was required, based on the reasoning that the physical placement of the GPS device on the Jeep was itself a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed regarding the physical search but went further, discussing the harms of long-term GPS tracking: “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”
Timothy Carpenter’s ill-fated robbery spree gave the Supreme Court another chance to address the constitutional harms of long-term tracking. In their attempts to connect Carpenter to the six electronics stores that had been robbed, federal investigators requested 127 days of location data from two mobile phone carriers. The problem for the police, however, was that they had obtained the information on Carpenter without a judicial warrant.
Carpenter challenged the FBI’s acquisition of his CSLI, claiming that it violated his reasonable expectation of privacy. In a 5–4 opinion, the Supreme Court determined that the acquisition of long-term CSLI was a Fourth Amendment search, which required a warrant. As the Court stated in its 2018 ruling: “A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.... [W]hen the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance.”
Jones and Carpenter are helpful for setting the boundaries of location-based searches. But, in truth, the cases generate a lot more questions than answers. What about surveillance that is not long-term? At what point does the aggregation of details about a person’s location violate their reasonable expectation of privacy?
Okelle Chatrie’s case, in which police used Google’s location data to identify him as the mystery bank robber, offers a stark warning about the limits of Fourth Amendment protections under these circumstances. It’s also a terrific example of why “geofence” warrants, which request information within a certain geographic boundary, are appealing to police. From surveillance footage, detectives could see that the suspect had a phone to his ear when he walked into the bank. A geofence could identify who the suspect was, and likely where he came from and where he went. Google held the answer in its virtual vault. A warrant gave investigators the key.
The police cast a broad net. The geofence warrant asked for data on all the cellphones within a 150-meter radius, an area, as the court described it, “about three and a half times the footprint of a New York city block.” After receiving the police’s initial request for information on all the phones in the area, Google returned 19 anonymized numbers. Over the course of a three-step warrant process, the company narrowed those 19 phones down to three and then to one, which it revealed as belonging to Okelle Chatrie.
If the police wish to buy the data, just like an insurer or marketing firm might, how can you object? It’s not your data.
The three-step warrant process is a unique innovation in the digital evidence space. Google’s lawyers developed a procedure whereby detectives seeking targeted geolocation data had to file three separate requests, first requesting identifying numbers in an area, then narrowing the request based on other information, and finally obtaining an order to unmask the anonymous number (or numbers) by providing a name.
To be clear, Google—a private company—required the government to jump through these hoops because Google considered it important to protect its customers’ data. It was the company’s lawyers—not the courts or the government—who demanded these warrants.
Warrants provide at least some procedural barrier to data collection by police. If government agencies want to avoid that minor hassle, they can simply buy the data instead. By contracting with data-location services, several federal agencies have already done so.
The logic for this Fourth Amendment loophole is straightforward: You gave your data to a third-party company, and the company can use it as it wishes. If you own a car that is smart enough to collect driving analytics, you clicked some agreement saying the car company could use the data—study it, analyze it, and, if it wants, sell it. If you don’t want to give them data in the first place, that is okay (although it will likely result in less optimal functionality), but you cannot rightly complain when they use the data you gave them in ways that benefit them. If the police wish to buy the data, just like an insurer or marketing firm might, how can you object? It’s not your data.
Fears about the amount of personal information that could be revealed with long-term GPS surveillance have become reality. Today, police don’t need to plant a device to track your movements—they can rely on your car or phone to do it for them.
This happened because companies sold convenience and consumers bought it. So it might be tempting to blame ourselves. We’re the ones buying this technology. If we don’t want to be tracked, we can always go back to using paper maps and writing down directions by hand. If few of us are willing to make that trade, that’s on us.
But it’s not that easy. You may still be able to choose a dumb bike over a smart one, but a car that tracks you will soon be the only type of car you can buy. And while cars and data can, in theory, be separated, that’s not true for all our smart things. Without cell-signal tracking capabilities, a cellphone is just a paperweight. And in today’s world, living without a phone or a car is simply not practical for many people.
There are technological steps we can take toward protecting privacy. Companies can localize the data the sensors generate within the devices themselves, rather than in a central location like the Sensorvault. Similarly, the information that allows you to unlock your Apple iPhone via facial recognition stays localized on the phone. These are technological fixes, and positive ones. But even localized data is available to police with a warrant.
This is the puzzle of the digital age. We can’t—or don’t want to—avoid creating data, but that data, once created, becomes available for legal ends. The power to track every person is the perfect tool for authoritarianism. For every wondrous story about catching a criminal, there will be a terrifying story of tracking a political enemy or suppressing dissent. Such immense power can and will be abused.
2026-03-17 20:00:08
As electronics demand higher energy density, one component has proved challenging to shrink: the capacitor. Making a smaller capacitor usually requires thinning the dielectric layer or electrode surface area, which has often resulted in a reduction of power. A new polymer material could help change that.
In a study published 18 February in Nature, a Pennsylvania State University-led team reported a capacitor crafted from a polymer blend that can operate at temperatures up to 250 °C while storing roughly four times as much energy as conventional polymer capacitors. Today’s advanced polymer capacitors typically function only up to about 100 °C, meaning engineers often rely on bulky cooling systems in high-power electronics. The research team has filed a patent for the polymer capacitors and plans to bring them to market.
Capacitors deliver rapid bursts of energy and stabilize voltage in circuits, making them essential in applications ranging from electric vehicles and aerospace electronics to power-grid infrastructure and AI data centers. Yet while transistors have steadily shrunk with advances in semiconductor manufacturing, passive components such as capacitors and inductors have not scaled at the same pace.
“Capacitors can account for 30 to 40 percent of the volume in some power electronics systems,” says Qiming Zhang, an electrical engineering researcher at Penn State and study author, explaining why it’s important to make smaller capacitors.
The research team combined two commercially available engineered plastics: polyetherimide (PEI), originally developed by General Electric and widely used in industrial equipment, and PBPDA, known for strong heat resistance and electrical insulation. When processed together under controlled conditions, the polymers self-assemble into nanoscale structures that form thin dielectric films inside capacitors. Those structures help suppress electrical leakage while allowing the material to polarize strongly in an electric field, allowing greater energy storage.
The resulting material exhibits an unusually high dielectric constant—a measure of how much electrical energy a material can store. Most polymer dielectrics have values around four, but the blended polymer dielectric in the new work had a value of 13.5.
“If you look at the literature up to now, no one has reached this level of dielectric constant in this type of polymer system,” Zhang says. “Putting two commonly used polymers together and seeing this kind of performance was a surprise to many people.”
Because the material can remain operational even at elevated temperatures—such as those from extreme environmental heat or hot spots in densely built components—capacitors built from this polymer could potentially store the same amount of energy in a smaller package.
“With this material, you can make the same device using about [one-fourth as much] material,” Zhang says. “Because the polymers themselves are inexpensive, the cost does not increase. At the same time, the component can become smaller and lighter.”
The researchers’ finding is “a big advancement,” says Alamgir Karim, a polymer research director at the University of Houston who was not involved in the Penn State development. “Normally when you mix polymers, you don’t expect the dielectric constant to increase.”
Karim says the effect likely arises from nanoscale interfaces created when the polymers partially separate. “At about a 50–50 mixture, the polymers don’t fully mix and instead create a very large interfacial area,” he says. “Those interfaces may be where the unusual electrical behavior comes from.”
If the material can be produced at scale, it could help address a key bottleneck in high-power electronics. Higher-temperature capacitors could reduce cooling requirements and allow engineers to pack more power into smaller systems—an advantage for aerospace platforms, electric vehicles, the electric grid, and other high-temperature environments.
But translating the concept from laboratory methods to commercial manufacturing may present challenges, says Zongliang Xie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Penn State team is now producing small dielectric films, but industrial capacitor manufacturing typically requires continuous rolls of material that can extend for kilometers.
“Industry generally prefers extrusion-based processing because it’s easier and cheaper to control,” Xie says. “Scaling to produce great lengths of film while maintaining the same structure and performance could complicate matters. There’s potential, but it’s also challenging.”
Still, researchers say the discovery demonstrates that new performance limits may still be unlocked using familiar materials. “Developing the material is only the first step,” Zhang says. “But it shows people that this barrier can be broken.”
2026-03-17 19:00:06
Looming over the internet lasers and firestarting phones companies were touting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, was a more nebulous but much larger announcement: a pan-European cloud called EURO-3C.
EURO-3C’s backers – Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica, dozens of other European companies, and the European Commission (EC) – aim to fill a gap. U.S.-based cloud giants dominate in the EU, and European policymakers want their growing portfolio of digital government services on a “sovereign cloud” under full EU control.
But the EU lacks a real equivalent to the likes of AWS or Microsoft Azure. Indeed, any effort to build one will inevitably run up against the same U.S. cloud giants.
Just four U.S.-based hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud – together account for some 70 percent of EU cloud services. This is despite the fact that the 2018 U.S. CLOUD Act allows U.S. federal law enforcement – at least in theory – to compel U.S.-based firms to hand over data that’s stored abroad.
But those hypothetical risks to digital services have become more real as transatlantic relations have soured under the second Trump administration. The U.S. has openly threatened to invade an EU member state and sanctioned a European Commissioner for passing legislation the White House dislikes.
After the White House sanctioned the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court in February 2025, Court staffers claimed Microsoft locked the Court’s chief prosecutor out of his email (Microsoft has denied this). Around the same time, the U.S. reportedly threatened to sever EU ally Ukraine’s access to crucial Starlink satellite internet as leverage during trade negotiations.
“The geopolitical risk isn’t just the most extreme form of a doomsday ‘kill switch’ where Washington turns off Europe’s internet,” Stéfane Fermigier of EuroStack, an industry group that supports European digital independence. “It is the selective degradation of services and a total lack of retaliatory leverage.”
What, then, is the EU to do? France offers an example. Even before 2025, France implemented harsh restrictions on non-EU cloud providers in public services – providers must locate data in the EU, rely on EU-based staff, and may not have majority-non-EU shareholders. Now, EU policymakers are following France’s lead.
In October 2025, the EC issued a two-part framework for judging cloud providers bidding for public sector contracts. In the first part, the framework lays out a sort of sovereignty ladder. The more that a provider is subject to EU law, the higher its sovereignty level on this ladder. Any prospective bidder must first meet a certain level, depending on the tender.
Qualifying bidders then move to the second part, where their “sovereignty” is scored in more detail. Using too much proprietary software; over-relying on supply chains from outside the EU; having non-EU support staff; liability to non-EU laws like the CLOUD Act: all hurt a bidder’s score.
The framework was created for one tender, but observers say it sets a major precedent. Cloud providers bidding for state contracts across Europe may need to follow it, and it may influence legislation on both national and EU-wide levels.
Who, then, will receive high marks? At the moment, the answer is not simple. The EU cloud scene is quite fragmented. Numerous modest EU providers offer “sovereign cloud” services – such as Scaleway, OVHcloud, and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems – but none are on the scale of AWS or Google Cloud.
Inertia is on the side of the U.S. cloud giants, who can invest in their infrastructure and services on a far grander scale than their European counterparts. Some U.S. providers now offer cloud services they say comply with the Commission’s “cloud sovereignty” demands.
Some European observers, like EuroStack, say such promises are hollow so long as a provider’s parent company is subject to the likes of the CLOUD Act, and loopholes in the Commission’s process remain open. An AWS spokesperson told Spectrum it had not disclosed any non-US enterprise or government data to the U.S. government under the CLOUD Act; a Google spokesperson said that its most sensitive EU offerings “are subject to local laws, not US law”.
Even if a project like EURO-3C can offer a large-scale alternative, the US cloud giants have another sort of inertia. Many developers – and many public purchasers of their services – will need convincing to leave behind a familiar environment.
“If you look at AWS, you look at Google, they’ve created some super technology. It’s very convenient, it’s easy to use,” says Arnold Juffer, CEO of the Netherlands-based cloud provider Nebul. “Once you’re in that platform, in that ecosystem, it’s very hard to get out.”
Martyna Chmura, an analyst at the Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute, a London-based think tank, sees some EU developers taking a mixed approach. “Many organizations are already moving toward multi-cloud setups, using European or sovereign providers for sensitive workloads while still relying on hyperscalers for certain services,” she says.
In that case, the EU’s top-down demands may encourage developers to use EU providers for sensitive applications – like government services, transport, autonomous vehicles, and some industrial automation – even if it’s inconvenient in the short term, or if it causes even more fragmentation of the EU cloud scene. “Running systems across different platforms can increase integration costs and make security and data governance more complicated. In some cases, organisations could lose some of the efficiency and cost advantages that come from using large hyperscale platforms,” Chmura says.
“Overall, the EU appears willing to accept some of these trade-offs,” Chmura says.
2026-03-17 04:42:45
In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.
This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) from 18 to 20 November, 2025. GridEx has been held every two years since 2011.
“We know that threat actors look to exploit certain circumstances,” says Michael Ball, CEO of E-ISAC, which is a program of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), about designing the Beryllia scenario. “The Chalice Games became a good example of how we could build a scenario around a threat actor.”
Physical attacks on the grid are rising in the U.S., and GridEx attendance was up in November as utilities grapple with how to prevent and mitigate attacks. Participation in the exercise was at its highest level since 2019, according to a report released on 2 March. Given the number of organizations present, GridEx estimates that more than 28,000 individual players participated, including utility workers and government partners, an all-time high since the exercise began.
The U.S. and Canadian grids face growing security issues from physical threats, including vandalism, assault of utility workers, intrusion of property, and theft of components, like copper wiring. NERC’s 2025 E-ISAC end of year report cites more than 3,500 physical security breaches that calendar year, about 3 percent of which disrupted electricity. That’s up from 2,800 events cited in the 2023 report (3 percent of those also resulted in electricity disruptions). Yet despite a number of recent high-profile attacks in the U.S., physical attacks on the grid are happening worldwide.
“They’re not uniquely a U.S. thing,” says Danielle Russo, executive director of the Center for Grid Security at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing national energy security. Russo says that while attacks are common in places like Ukraine, they’re not limited to wartime scenarios. “Other countries that are not experiencing direct conflict are experiencing increasing amounts of physical attacks on their energy infrastructure,” she says. Take Germany for example: On 3 January, an arson attack by left-wing activists in Berlin caused a five-day blackout impacting 45,000 households. That comes after a suspected arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 left 50,000 Berlin households without power. Some German officials cite domestic extremism and fears of Russian sabotage in recent years as reasons for heightened security concerns over critical infrastructure.
The uptick in attacks on the U.S. grid has been anchored by a number of incidents in recent years. In December 2025, an engineer in San Jose, California was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bombing electric transformers in 2022 and 2023. A Tennessee man was arrested in November 2024 for attempting to attack a Nashville substation using a drone armed with explosives. And in 2023, a neo-Nazi leader was among two arrested in a plot to attack five substations around Baltimore with firearms, part of an increasing trend in white supremacist groups planning to attack the U.S. energy sector.
“Since [E-ISAC] started publishing data back in 2016, we’ve seen a large and consistent increase in the number of reported physical security incidents per year,” says Michael Coe, the vice president of physical and cyber security programs at the American Public Power Association, a trade group that works with E-ISAC to plan GridEx. While not all data is publicly available, Coe says there’s been a “tenfold” increase over the past decade in the number of reported physical attacks on the grid.
During the fictional World Chalice Games scenario, drone attacks destroyed Beryllia’s substation equipment, highlighting a threat that’s gained traction as more drones enter the airspace.
“The question we get all the time is, how do you tell if it’s a bad actor, or if it’s a 12-year-old kid that got the drone for their birthday?” says Erika Willis, the program manager for the substations team at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
One strategy to track and alert utilities to potential threats such as drones is called sensor fusion. The system includes a pan-tilt-zoom camera capable of 360-degree motion mounted on top of a tripod or pole with four installed radars. The radars combine with the camera for a dual system that can track drones even if they’re obstructed from view, says Willis. For instance, if a nearby drone flies behind a tree, hidden from the camera, the radars will still pick up on it. The technology is currently being tested at EPRI’s labs in Charlotte, North Carolina and Lenox, Massachusetts.
EPRI is also exploring how robotics and AI can improve security systems, Willis says. One approach involves integrating AI analysis into robotic technology already surveilling substation perimeters. Using AI can improve detection of break-ins and damage to fencing around substations, Willis says. “As opposed to a human having to go through 200 images of a fence, you can have the AI overlays do some of those algorithms…If the robot has done the inspection of the substation 100 times, it can then relay to you that there’s an anomaly,” Willis says.
Prisma Photonics deploys fiber sensing technology that uses reflected optical signals to detect perturbations from vehicles and other sources near underground fiber cable.Prisma Photonics
Already, a number of utilities in the U.S. are using AI integrations in their security and monitoring processes. That’s thanks in part to the Tel Aviv, Israel-based Prisma Photonics, a software company that launched in 2017 and has since deployed its fiber sensing technology across thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. A file-cabinet-sized unit plugs into a substation and sends light pulses down existing fiber optic cables 30 miles in each direction. As the pulses travel down the cables, a tiny fraction of the light is reflected back to the substation unit. An AI model processes the results and can classify events based on patterns in the optical signal as a result of perturbations happening around the fiber cable.
“If we identify an event that we don’t have a classification for, and we get a feedback from a customer saying, ‘oh, this was a car crash,’ then we can classify that in the model to say this is actually what happened,” says Tiffany Menhorn, Prisma Photonics’ vice president of North America.
As preparations get underway for the ninth GridEx in 2027, Ball says participation in the exercises alone isn’t enough to bolster grid security. Instead, he wants utilities to take what they learn from the training and apply it in their own operations. “It’s the action of doing it, versus our statistic of saying, ‘here’s what our growth was.’ That growth should relate to the readiness and capability of the industry.”
I changed the tense on this because the subsequent sentences use past tense. It seemed weird to switch from present tense in the first sentence to past tense in the rest of the paragraph, but I could be mistaken.
2026-03-17 04:00:03
The America’s Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age report, published last year by the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, and Labor, identified a significant engineering and skills gap. The 27-page report concluded that the shortage of talent in essential areas—including advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cybersecurity—poses significant risks to U.S. economic and technological leadership.
To help attract talent in those fields, the Labor Department last month introduced incentives for apprenticeships, including a US $145 million “pay for performance” grant program. The funding aims to develop registered apprenticeships in high-demand fields including artificial intelligence and information technology.
Reacting to the urgent national need for targeted workforce development were members of IEEE Young Professionals, led by Alok Tibrewala, an IEEE senior member. He is a cochair of the IEEE North Jersey Section’s Young Professionals group.
“As a software engineer, this impending shortage concerns me because I believe that the U.S. AI and cybersecurity skills gap would show up first in the early-career pipeline,” Tibrewala says. “Students will be entering the U.S. workforce without enough hands-on experience building secure AI-enabled enterprise and cloud systems, and this gap will persist without practical, mentor-led training before graduation.”
Tibrewala led a strategic planning session with representatives from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, IEEE Member and Geographic Activities, and IEEE Young Professionals to discuss holding an event that would provide practical, industry-relevant training by experts and IEEE leaders.
“I was able to establish a partnership with NJIT, recruit speakers, design the event’s agenda, and promote the event to ensure it was aligned with the strategy outlined in the workforce report,” he says. “This effort aligns with broader U.S. workforce development priorities focused on industry-driven skills training in critical technology areas.”
The IEEE Buildathon event was held on 1 November at NJIT’s Newark campus. More than 30 students and early-career engineers heard from 11 speakers. Through interactive workshops, live demonstrations, and networking opportunities, they left with practical, employer-aligned skills and clearer career pathways for AI-era skills-building.
Tibrewala chaired the event and also serves as chair of the IEEE Buildathon program.
Region 1 Director Bala S. Prasanna, a life senior member, gave the keynote address. He emphasized the need for universities, industry practitioners, and IEEE volunteer leaders to collaborate on programs to enhance technical skills.
IEEE Member Kalyani Matey, cochair of the IEEE North Jersey Section’s Young Professionals, conducted a workshop on how to build one’s personal brand and a responsive network. Participants received valuable insights about résumé building, effective communication strategies, and enhancing their visibility and employability.
“Over time, this kind of structured, employer-aligned training will help increase confidence, employability, and technical readiness across the country. With sustained support, programs like the IEEE Buildathon can become a practical bridge from education to industry in the AI era.” —Alok Tibrewala
Tibrewala led the Unlocking AI’s Potential: Solving Big Challenges With Smart Data and IEEE DataPort session. The web-based DataPort platform allows researchers to store, share, access, and manage their research datasets in a single, trusted location. He discussed needed skills including AI literacy, strong data handling and dataset stewardship, and turning data into actionable insights.
Chaitali Ladikkar, a senior software engineer, delivered the insightful Brains Behind the Game seminar. Ladikkar, an IEEE member, highlighted the transformative impact AI is having on gaming and game engine technologies. She explained how AI is reshaping game development. She also covered how machine learning is being used for animation, faster content generation and testing of new titles. Her seminar received enthusiastic feedback from participants.
The Building Better Business Relationships DiSC workshop provided insights into enhancing professional relationships and communication within an engineering workforce. DiSC is a behavioral self-assessment used to understand an individual’s communication style and to adapt to others.
The event received high praise from participants for its practical and industry-relevant content, according to Tibrewala.
“This training significantly enhanced my understanding and readiness for industry roles, filling gaps my regular academic coursework did not fully address,” said Humna Sultan, an IEEE student member who is a senior studying computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J.
“The Buildathon was structured around real engineering challenge scenarios that deepened my understanding of AI and cloud technologies,” said Carlos Figueredo, an IEEE graduate student member who is studying data science at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. “It boosted my confidence and practical skills essential for the industry.”
Bavani Karthikeyan Janaki said “it was incredible to see how technology and sustainability came together to drive real-world impact, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the organizers including Tibrewala, Matey, and the IEEE North Jersey Young Professionals.” Janaki is pursuing a master’s degree in computer and information science at Long Island University, in New York.
The Buildathon was made possible through grants from the IEEE Young Professionals group and funding from the IEEE North Jersey Section and IEEE Member and Geographic Activities. Their support shows how IEEE’s professional organizations can collaborate to address workforce needs by supporting the delivery of technical sessions that strengthen early-career pipelines.
Building on the event’s success, Tibrewala and Matey plan to make the IEEE Buildathon an ongoing initiative. They are exploring ways to expand it to additional university campuses and IEEE communities.
Tibrewala says they plan to refine the format based on participant feedback and lessons learned. To support consistent quality, he and Matey say, they are working on a playbook for organizers that will include a repeatable agenda, a workshop template, speaker guidelines, and post-event feedback forms.
The approach depends on continued coordination among host universities, local IEEE sections, and Young Professional volunteers, Tibrewala says.
“Enabling other groups to run similar events,” he says, “can help more students and early-career engineers gain practical exposure to AI, data, cloud, cybersecurity, and other key emerging technologies in a structured setting.
“Efforts like this help translate national workforce priorities into real training that students and early-career engineers can apply immediately to their projects. This also helps close the gap between classroom learning and the realities of building secure, reliable systems in production environments. Over time, this kind of structured, employer-aligned training will help increase confidence, employability, and technical readiness across the country.
“With sustained support, programs like the IEEE Buildathon can become a practical bridge from education to industry in the AI era.”
2026-03-14 00:00:04
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
All legged robots deployed “in the wild” to date were given a body plan that was predefined by human designers and could not be redefined in situ. The manual and permanent nature of this process has resulted in very few species of agile terrestrial robots beyond familiar four-limbed forms. Here, we introduce highly athletic modular building blocks and show how they enable the automatic design and rapid assembly of novel agile robots that can “hit the ground running” in unstructured outdoor environments.
[ Northwestern UniversityCenter for Robotics and Biosystems ] [ Paper ] via [ Gizmodo ]
If you were going to develop the ideal urban delivery robot more or less from scratch, it would be this.
[ RIVR ]
Don’t get me wrong, there are some clever things going on here, but I’m still having a lot of trouble seeing where the unique, sustainable value is for a humanoid robot performing these sorts of tasks.
[ Figure ]
One of those things that you don’t really think about as a human, but is actually pretty important.
[ Paper ] via [ ETH Zurich ]
We propose TRIP-Bag (Teleoperation, Recording, Intelligence in a Portable Bag), a portable, puppeteer-style teleoperation system fully contained within a commercial suitcase, as a practical solution for collecting high-fidelity manipulation data across varied settings.
[ KIMLAB ]
We propose an open-vocabulary semantic exploration system that enables robots to maintain consistent maps and efficiently locate (unseen) objects in semi-static real-world environments using LLM-guided reasoning.
[ TUM ]
That’s it folks, we have no need for real pandas anymore—if we ever did in the first place. Be honest, what has a panda done for you lately?
[ MagicLab ]
RoboGuard is a general-purpose guardrail for ensuring the safety of LLM-enabled robots. RoboGuard is configured offline with high-level safety rules and a robot description, reasons about how these safety rules are best applied in robot’s context, then synthesizes a plan that maximally follows user preferences while ensuring safety.
[ RoboGuard ]
In this demonstration, a small team responds to a (simulated) radiation contamination leak at a real nuclear reactor facility. The team deploys their reconfigurable robot to accompany them through the facility. As the station is suddenly plunged into darkness, the robot’s camera is hot-swapped to thermal so that it can continue on. Upon reaching the approximate location of the contamination, the team installs a Compton gamma-ray camera and pan-tilt illuminating device. The robot autonomously steps forward, locates the radiation source, and points it out with the illuminator.
[ Paper ]
On March 6th, 2025, the Robomechanics Lab at CMU was flooded with 4 feet of black water (i.e. mixed with sewage). We lost most of the robots in the lab, and as a tribute my students put together this “In Memoriam” video. It includes some previously unreleased robots and video clips.
[ Carnegie Mellon University Robomechanics Lab ]
There haven’t been a lot of successful education robots, but here’s one of them.
[ Sphero ]
The opening keynote from the 2025 Silicon Valley Humanoids Summit: “Insights Into Disney’s Robotic Character Platform,” by Moritz Baecher, Director, Zurich Lab, Disney Research.
[ Humanoids Summit ]