Justin Hendrix, the CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy, interviewed two podcast guests: HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, and Maheen Khan, director of technology at the Invisible Institute. His August 30, 2026 podcast interview with Patrick and Maheen explored how the new Technology Freedom Cooperative can help nonprofit organizations protect evidence, reduce their dependence on big tech platforms, and build capacity.

In a 29 June, 2026 segment of MS Now, Maddow talks with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, authors of “On Courage: How to be a dissident in an age of fear,” about how to live as an American during a time of authoritarianism. The book, On Courage, quotes Patrick Ball, whom Maddow refers to as “a human rights statistician who has spent his whole career cataloguing perpetrators of state violence.”

Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him. In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there’s every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are “too big to care” – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.

“They’re one of the most important NGOs that no one’s ever heard of. … What they do is very rigorous statistical extrapolations of information that’s not in the record, about wars, civil wars, coups, oppressive states, and they’re used for truth and reconciliation, human rights tribunals, war crimes trials. … They’ve worked on every high-profile war crimes trial in the century.”

“You look at all the huge problems in the world, and you are trying to find ways to plug in. And it turns out—whether it is cooking a meal for somebody who’s hungry or cleaning some data so that you can do analysis on the things that we actually need to do to advance our work to make the world a little bit better— the main thing they require is somebody to care enough to do it.”