Democracy Forum 4/17/26: Constitutional Crisis: They’re Watching

About this episode

The episode discusses the threats of mass surveillance to free speech and civil liberties.

Host: Ann Luther, League of Women Voters of Maine Production Assistance: Linda Washburn, Joel Mann Democracy Forum: Participatory Democracy, encouraging citizens to take an active role in government and politics. This month: Mass surveillance constitutes a threat to free speech. Commercial and government surveillance infrastructure has grown and continues to grow, encompassing license plate readers, location tracking, and facial recognition and other biometric data. How do these invasions of privacy threaten free speech? What protections should individuals and civil society adopt to protect civil liberties? Guest/s: Cindy Cohn, Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), author of the book, Privacy’s Defender. Hannah Cyrus, Digital Media Librarian, Bangor Public Library. Cooper Quintin, security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the EFF Threat Lab and board member of Open Archive. To learn more about this topic: Visit LWVME.org About the host: Ann Luther currently serves as Treasurer of the League of Women Voters of Maine and leads the LWVME Advocacy Team. She served as President of LWVME from 2003 to 2007 and as co-president from…

People in this episode

Host: Ann Luther

Guests: Cindy Cohn, Hannah Cyrus, Cooper Quintin

Topics covered

• mass surveillance
• free speech
• civil liberties
• privacy

Keywords

• participatory democracy
• government surveillance
• biometric data

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Privacy's Defender

Books & works: Privacy’s Defender, Democracy Forum 4/17/26

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