GoKawiilBack in 2022 when Cindy Cohn, the executive director of a US digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started writing her memoir, Privacy’s Defender, she worried that people would think she was an “old fuddy duddy” still sounding alarms about government spying online.
As one of EFF’s first litigators and then its longtime leader, Cohn witnessed firsthand how government surveillance became one of the earliest concerns for civil rights advocates when the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s. Since then, attention has pivoted away from caring about government’s Internet abuses to focusing much more on Big Tech harms, she said.
But then Donald Trump’s second term started, launching aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations nationwide that depended on abusing tech to support its goals of mass deportation. Railing against ICE raids, communities have quickly mobilized to defend online privacy, even banding together across political divides to tear down Flock cameras that can aid in arrests. Maybe even more concerning, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has increasingly sought to unmask ICE critics on social media—and largely failed—EFF has filed and backed lawsuits fighting to protect Americans’ rights to track ICE activity and share information anonymously online.
Published earlier this month, Cohn’s memoir traces the history of three big EFF lawsuits that marched an army of pioneers, hackers, and cypherpunks into courts to smartly translate technical concepts that judges couldn’t quite grasp and establish baselines for online privacy. It also spotlights the government’s moves building up its own cadre of experts to seize more subpoena authority in the name of national security, which Cohn suggested paved the way for feared abuses today.
Privacy’s Defender has suddenly become relevant again, she said, since the “Trump administration is willing to very openly do things that other administrations kind of were sneaky and hiding about.” That boldness, she said, has made it obvious how much the government’s spying today depends on Big Tech surveillance—like asking platforms like Facebook to reveal the identity of their users or app store operators like Apple to remove disfavored apps.