Access Now is an international civil-society organization that defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk. Co-founded in 2009 by Brett Solomon, who served as its executive director from 2009 to 2024, the organization maintains operational programs in the U.S., Brazil, Costa Rica, Kenya, Tunisia, Belgium, Germany, India, and the Philippines (Source: accessnow.org). Alejandro Mayoral Baños succeeded Solomon as executive director on October 1, 2024, joining a staff of more than 140 (Source: accessnow.org). The organization operates the Digital Security Helpline and RightsCon, the largest annual gathering of human-rights and digital-rights advocates, governments, businesses, and technologists.
Operational programs
The Digital Security Helpline provides 24/7 emergency response for at-risk users, activists, journalists, and human-rights defenders, and is one of the few civil-society infrastructures with operational capacity for at-risk-user defense. The Helpline grew out of the organization's emergency response team and went public in 2013; it has since assisted in more than 10,000 cases and provides rapid-response assistance in nine languages (Source: accessnow.org).
Access Now also convenes the #KeepItOn campaign against internet shutdowns, formed at RightsCon Silicon Valley in 2016, a coalition representing more than 345 organizations from 106 countries (Source: accessnow.org). A grants program provides flexible funding to grassroots digital-rights organizations, and the organization publishes independently audited financials and tax filings (Source: accessnow.org).
Access Now also conducts policy advocacy, particularly on encryption, content moderation, surveillance, AI rights, and disinformation in democratic processes.
RightsCon
RightsCon is the organization's annual conference, launched in 2011 in Silicon Valley and since hosted in Rio de Janeiro, Manila, Brussels, Toronto, Tunis, and online; the 2022 edition registered 9,329 participants from 162 countries across more than 560 sessions (Source: accessnow.org).
2026 Lusaka edition
The 2026 edition was scheduled for Lusaka, Zambia, and did not take place (Source: Access Now press release; New Developments Log/2026-05-09-2101). In a statement dated May 1, 2026, the RightsCon and Access Now teams set out their account. On April 27, one day after a Zambian government press release endorsed the conference, Zambia's Ministry of Technology and Science (MoTS) told Access Now by phone that diplomats from the People's Republic of China were pressuring the government because Taiwanese civil-society participants planned to attend in person. On the evening of April 28, a national public holiday, state-owned media announced that the government had "postponed" RightsCon; on April 29 the ministry's first written communication, delivered over WhatsApp, said the postponement was needed for "comprehensive disclosure of critical information relating to key thematic issues" and to "ensure full alignment with Zambia's national values." According to the statement, the conditions conveyed informally for lifting the postponement were that Access Now moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation, which Access Now called "our red line." The conference had been due to welcome more than 2,600 participants in person and 1,100 online from over 150 countries (Source: rightscon.org).
Reporting identified the Taiwanese speakers at issue as Jo-Fan Yu, CEO of the Taiwan Network Information Center, and E-Ling Chiu, director of Amnesty International Taiwan (Source: 404media.co). Amnesty International condemned the Zambian government's decision as "an act of Chinese transnational repression" and noted that the agenda included sessions on Uyghur forced labour, Chinese surveillance and the digital reach of the Belt and Road Initiative (Source: amnesty.org). Access Now framed the cancellation as extraterritorial pressure on civil-society convening and as evidence of "the far reach of transnational repression targeting civil society," characterizing it as a new modality of AI and Authoritarianism (Source: rightscon.org).
Positions and arguments
On encryption, Access Now holds a consistent position against backdoors and the weakening of end-to-end encryption, framing encryption as a digital right.
On surveillance technology, the organization conducts sustained advocacy for export controls on spyware, including Pegasus, Predator, and Candiru, and its Digital Security Helpline is listed alongside export controls as a response to government commercial spyware (Surveillance Technology). This concern cross-links to Chip Smuggling and Export-Control Evasion, though chip-smuggling concerns the AI-compute version of export-control evasion while Access Now's primary concern is surveillance-tech compute.
On AI rights, Access Now argues that human-rights frameworks must explicitly apply to AI systems. It is a member of the global coalition of digital-rights organizations pushing for AI-specific human-rights instruments at UN OHCHR. In the EU it has tracked the AI Act from the Commission's April 12, 2021 proposal onward (Source: accessnow.org), and it signed the joint statement of the AI Act civil-society coalition and the #ProtectNotSurveil coalition responding to the Commission's consultation on the Act's prohibitions and AI-system definition. That statement asked the Commission's guidelines to close loopholes in the ban on untargeted scraping of facial images (citing Clearview AI and PimEyes), to distinguish medical devices from "emotion recognition" systems, and to confirm that the biometric-categorisation ban covers inferences drawn from "ethnicity" and "gender identity" (Source: edf-feph.org).
In US chatbot-safety debates, civil-society organizations including Access Now and the ACLU have divided on whether outright minor-use bans such as the GUARD Act are sound policy or a free-speech overreach (Policy Brief: The second wave of state chatbot / AI-mental-health laws — tracker).
Relationships
- related: AI and Authoritarianism — Access Now characterized the RightsCon cancellation as extraterritorial pressure on civil-society convening
- related: Rightscon — annual conference operated by Access Now
- related: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — US digital-rights peers
- related: Surveillance Technology, AI and Surveillance, AI and Democracy, EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689)