Date
In this session, Cindy talked about her recently published professional memoir. In "Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance" (MIT Press), Cindy weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders. Along the way she talked both about the history of the internet and EFF, and also how those fights are increasingly relevant today.
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Speaker
Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. Ms. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography.
Ms. Cohn has been named to The NonProfit Times 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, honoring 2020's movers and shakers. In 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn." She was also named in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online." In 2007 the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.
Ms. Cohn is the author of the professional memoir, called "Privacy's Defender: My Thirty Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance" to be published by MIT Press in March 2026. She is also the co-host of EFF's award winning podcast, "How to Fix the Internet."