The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), Cornell Tech Policy Institute (TPI), and Fedi are leading a new two-year, integrated study on American attitudes toward financial privacy. This project is the first to systematically examine how public policy and enforcement shape both user behavior and developer decisions around privacy technologies.

As Director Sarah Kreps notes, the study will move debates about privacy “from the abstract” to evidence by tracking how policy signals affect public behavior and developer choices over time. The research combines nationally representative surveys of U.S. users with in-depth interviews of developers working on Bitcoin and related open-source systems, with four semi-annual reports beginning in April 2026 and running through 2027.

On Friday, January 23rd, Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute Director’s Fellow John Miller gave a seminar on how drone warfare has evolved over the past decade and what it means for future conflict. He traced the shift from expensive, high‑end systems like the Predator and Reaper to cheap, mass‑produced DJI‑scale platforms now central to the war in Ukraine, where entire units are dedicated to drone production, modification, and employment. John highlighted how existing taxonomies of drones fail to capture operational realities and explained his current research on drone fault hierarchies and vulnerabilities, including GPS spoofing, communications jamming, and emerging directed‑energy threats. He noted that while many electronic warfare risks can be mitigated through advanced signal processing and software, high‑energy lasers pose a growing challenge as more states develop scalable directed‑energy systems. His ongoing work explores low‑cost sensing solutions that could help drones detect laser targeting in milliseconds and enable swarm‑level evasive behaviors, with implications for both U.S. doctrine and adversary counter‑drone strategies.