The Lawyer Fighting Government Surveillance for 30 Years (With EFF's Cindy Cohn)
4/6/202655 min
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 around testimony and documents shared by Mark Klein, who showed schematics and design documents for secret surveillance rooms in AT&T’s offices. And finally it follows the Alphabet Cases, which were lawsuits against FBI gag orders for national security letters, which are secret demands for customer information that came with gag orders against internet companies that prevented them from disclosing the fact that the FBI approached them for information. Those cases concerned both Cloudflare and a telecom company called CREDO, and went on for many years. Our interview with Cindy shows that the fight for privacy happens in fits and spurts, and is rarely linear. Cindy's Book Privacy Defender: https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/2OwH_XyfEhs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsBob Safian· Soundbite0:00
[upbeat music] The pace of change today can be overwhelming. What's most important to pay attention to if you want to be creative, successful, innovative? I'm Bob Safian, host of Rapid Response. Rapid Response is a podcast that cuts through the noise, featuring candid conversations twice a week with top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. From the team behind the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast comes Rapid Response. Search wherever you get your podcasts to listen and subscribe.
Cindy Cohn· Guest0:31
People would say, "Are you more worried about the company spying on you or the government spying on you?" And I'm like, "Nobody's offering you that choice."
Jason Koebler· Host0:40
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast. As a reminder, 404 Media is a journalist-owned company and needs your support. Subscribers get bonus episodes, bonus segments, and early access to interview episodes like this one. To subscribe, go to fourohfourmedia.co. I'm Jason Keebler, and this week I'm bringing you an interview I 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. As part of a live stream for the EFF, I talked to Cindy about her new book called Privacy's Defender, which is a memoir of her work to protect Americans' privacy and fight government surveillance. I read a lot of books about tech, and I really liked Privacy's Defender in part because it weaves Cindy's life