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). It 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).
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). The 2026 edition was scheduled for Lusaka, Zambia, but was cancelled on 2026-05-01 after reported Chinese-government pressure on the Zambian government (Source: Access Now press release; New Developments Log/2026-05-09-2101). Access Now framed the cancellation as extraterritorial pressure on civil-society convening, characterizing it as a new modality of AI and Authoritarianism.
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.
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. 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.
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