Cindy Cohn — Protecting Privacy in the Digital Age
EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn traces her 30-year legal battle for digital privacy rights, from the Crypto Wars to post-9/11 surveillance to AI.
Why we picked this
Cohn has been fighting government surveillance since before most people had email — her memoir covers the legal battles that created the privacy rights we now take for granted, arriving at the moment they're most under threat.
Cindy Cohn has spent thirty years as the legal conscience of the internet. As Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a team she joined as lead counsel in 1993 and has led since 2015 — she has argued landmark cases against government wiretapping programs, challenged NSA mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, and fought FBI gag orders that prevented citizens from knowing their data was being searched. At Town Hall Seattle, she presents her memoir Privacy’s Defender, which reads both as personal history and as a chronicle of how hard-fought the digital rights we rely on actually are.
The talk ranges across the full arc of the internet age: the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, when the government tried to ban strong encryption; the post-9/11 surveillance state; and the current moment, where AI systems mine personal data at a scale that makes earlier surveillance look quaint. Cohn draws direct lines between privacy erosion and authoritarianism, arguing that the ability to communicate without being watched is not a technical nicety but a precondition for protest, organizing, and democracy itself.
This is a talk for anyone who has ever wondered who actually reads their messages, stores their location data, or trains language models on their behavior — and what, if anything, can be done about it. Cohn is precise where tech discourse tends toward vagueness, and her decades in courtrooms give the evening a grounded urgency that distinguishes it from standard privacy hand-wringing.