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.

The Privacy@Michigan event with Albert Fox Cahn examined the ways that novel technologies are driving inequality, eroding autonomy, and undermining rule of law. It also looked at the glimmers of hope piercing the darkness of this moment. Albert highlighted litigation, legislation, and grassroots organizing campaigns that are pushing back every day on the growth of Orwellian technologies.

An eleven-foot Robocop statue stands prominently in Eastern Market. A defense contractor headquarters is moving to the riverfront. A drone conference is scheduled to take place on land, in the air and on the water. A large billboard and an annual conference signal Palantir’s investment into Detroit as “America’s Future,” a billion dollar renovated “train” station and technology campus is building a drone highway, and the World Economic Forum has its eyes on the city as a potential location for its global Davos summit.
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