Cindy Cohn on How to Sustain the Fight Against Authoritarianism
Today’s guest has spent thirty years on the front lines of one of the defining battles at the intersection of technology and democracy: privacy and the fight for who controls your digital life.
Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and she has been in the room for some of the most consequential fights over digital rights since the internet became part of everyday life—from fighting for encryption in the 90s, to the NSA mass surveillance revelations, to battling FBI gag orders that kept Americans in the dark about government data requests, and now for the fight against the grave civil rights and privacy abuses of the Trump administration.
Now, as she’s preparing to step down from her role at EFF, she’s telling her story, and trying to recruit a new generation to the fight. Her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, out March 10 from MIT Press, weaves her personal journey with the legal battles she’s fought on behalf of whistleblowers, researchers, innovators, and everyday people.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance
Related Knowledge Center: State surveillance
While government monitoring of personal digital communications has traditionally been associated with authoritarian regimes such as China, the Trump regime has moved to use citizens’ personal information in unprecedented ways.
Digital privacy and data security | FISA — Section 702