Who is behind this.

Alena Popova

Human rights lawyer, founder, investor and technology policy analyst in Washington, DC. She led two of Russia's largest digital rights campaigns: against facial recognition surveillance, with more than 100,000 signatures, lawsuits in Moscow courts and the first challenge to the technology at the European Court of Human Rights, and the Protect My Data legal bot used by more than 15,000 people; and for a domestic violence law, with more than a million signatures and litigation. She founded Cyber Guardians for Democracy, a nonprofit on digital rights, ethics and technology. She has served on the board of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control since 2018, campaigns with Stop Killer Robots and has taken part in the United Nations process on autonomous weapons for a decade. The Russian Ministry of Justice designated her a "foreign agent" for her public opposition to the war in Ukraine; she lives and works in exile in the United States.

She holds a master's degree in technology and security from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), completed in 2026, and is completing an LLM at Georgetown University Law Center on a merit scholarship. She also holds a degree in journalism from Moscow State University and a degree in law from Kutafin Moscow State Law University. She was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Davis Center at Harvard University and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a Vital Voices Fellow.

Her writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and Politico; she has been interviewed by the BBC, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and her litigation has been covered by Forbes and Reuters. She founded The Human Option in 2026. The project accepts no money from companies it assesses.