The Lawyer Fighting Government Surveillance for 30 Years (With EFF's Cindy Cohn)

About this episode

Jason interviews Cindy Cohn about her work in digital rights and her new memoir on privacy and government surveillance.

This week Jason brings you an interview he did with The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director Cindy Cohn, who recently announced she would be stepping down from the legendary digital rights nonprofit after decades of service. Cindy's new book “Privacy’s Defender,” is a memoir of her work to protect Americans’ privacy and fight government surveillance.Privacy’s Defender weaves Cindy’s life story through three incredibly important court cases. Rather than being a dry recounting of three complicated and technical cases, Cindy recounts her strategies in each case, the trials and tribulations she was going through during each period, and the stakes of each case. A quick backgrounder — the cases are Bernstein vs Department of Justice, decided in 1996, which established code and encryption as protected speech under the first amendment, a lasting decision that became critical in Apple’s lawsuit against the FBI in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting. It also follows EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for building a secret backdoor in its internet data centers that gave data to the NSA for warrantless surveillance against American citizens, a case that was built in part…

People in this episode

Host: Jason

Guest: Cindy Cohn

Topics covered

• government surveillance
• digital rights
• privacy
• court cases
• interview
• Cindy Cohn

Keywords

• government surveillance
• privacy
• Cindy Cohn
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• court cases
• digital rights
• memoir

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Electronic Frontier Foundation, NSA, Apple

Books & works: Privacy’s Defender

Places: San Bernardino

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