Our next guest has spent the last 30 years fighting for online privacy, speech rights, and just is fascinated by many of the same issues that we are at Hard Fork. She's the author of the memoir Privacy's Defender: My 30-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. And for the last 11 years, she was executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the oldest digital rights organizations in the world. We're so excited to have a conversation with her. Please welcome to the stage, Cindy Cohn.
Thank you. Oh, that was a pleasure.
I'm admiring your 'Let's Sue the Government' shirt.
We have the best merch, EFF, and I know they made this especially for me. So.
Cindy, how do we get those robot dogs banned?
They're creepy, aren't they? Oh my god.
Do you have a call you could make in DC?
You know, the thing that's creepy about them is what he said at the end, which is they're taking photos all the time, and they're going to last forever, right? Um, this kind of creepy mass surveillance in the form of a creepy dog. Uh.
Nothing. Nothing will go wrong.
Be a reason to sue the government, which is something that you did throughout your illustrious career at EFF. One of your first big fights back in the '90s was defending the cryptologist Daniel Bernstein against government restrictions on encrypted source code. 30 years later, we are still seeing fights between the government and private individuals over end-to-end encryption. How surprised are you that this battle is still going on, and how would you characterize the state of that fight today?
Yeah, I mean, look, we won the first round, which means that we have Signal, and we have HTTPS, and when you lose your phone, you don't lose all the data on it because it's encrypted. So, I mean, that was great. But, yeah, we continue to have to fight, and we, you know, in the Meta social media case, they used the fact that they offered encryption as an argument of a product defect, right? Um, so, the fight continues. I think, you know, law enforcement's interest in making sure nobody can ever have a private conversation just never goes away, but our need to have a private conversation online doesn't go away, either. So, um, you know, I think in the United States, we've managed to fend off, you know, there's periodically a bill, and their last bill was called EARN IT, but different bills to try to, you know, restrict encryption. But with, you know, the UK is a mess, Australia is a mess, we're going to have to... Canada now is debating something that Signal has said we're not going to be able to offer our product in, our tool in Canada if they pass this law. So, it's the fight just goes on, and I kind of come to the sad conclusion that it's just something like free speech, like privacy, that we're just always going to have to stand up for.
Hm.
I remember when I started covering tech more than a decade ago, the EFF was known for taking on the government, primarily fighting government overreach. Um, now you also fight big tech overreach. So, I'm curious, like, did that shift come as a surprise, and where does that leave you today in terms of allies? Like, who are the good guys?
Yeah, it's, um, I would say in the '90s we didn't anticipate that spying on everybody would become the number one business model of the internet.
It turns out, and it also, you know, has created this problem with the five big tech giants that control every, you know, the vast majority of people's experience online. And these two things together have really forced us to, you know, we don't make common cause with the tech giants anymore at the level that we used to because they used to stand up for their users and increasingly they're adversarial to their users. So, what I tell all the tech companies is, look, if you stand with your users, we will stand with you. And if you stand against your users, we're going to be the first in line. And sadly, that second part has become bigger than I think it should. Um, but it's dragged us into these places where we're adversarial against the tech giants because they're not standing with users.
I mean, I remember, you know, Kevin and I started covering tech around the same time and I remember, you know, whenever, you know, you guys would put out a statement, you know, like Google, Facebook, like Amazon were putting out statements. Like you guys were marching in lockstep. You just said that that united front is now broken. When did you first notice those cracks start to appear?
I mean, it depends on the topic, right? You know, the early fights EFF was involved a lot in trying to make copyright balanced in the digital age and we worked a lot with the companies on this because they wanted to give you the ability to make your own media and then rip, mix, and burn, those kinds of things. Um, and we would stand with them. Um, but I think again, as surveillance became the business model, as they became, you know, less interested in empowering their users and more interested in surveilling their users, we've separated and now, you know, we stand up for things like, you know, Section 230, the idea that, you know, nobody would host anybody else's speech if they were responsible for it. So, users need intermediaries to be able to speak. We've seen the tech companies roll over and support all of these exceptions, foster sister, and other things. Um, and they're not even standing up for their own rights anymore. Um, so, it's really topic by topic and issue by issue. Um, but I would say that in the last 10 years, it's less and less of the time that we end up standing with them because they don't stand with the users.
It obviously seems like that has accelerated quite a bit since President Trump was reelected. There's been a major rightward shift in some of these companies. You've talked to these people for many, many years. How much do you think that is driven by something truly ideological, and how much of it is just they think they can make more money this way?
It's hard to tell, honestly. I don't think they're being honest with themselves, much less the rest of us, um, about it, and certainly not me, right? I mean, I'm the civil liberties lawyer who shows up to beat up on them. So, you know, I don't really have the ear of the billionaires. I never count out money and maximizing the amount of money that you can make as the driver for people who have devoted their lives to making money, but I really can't tell, and I do feel like they're in their own echo chamber now in a way that wasn't true before. And so, they end up not understanding how they come off at a level that's pretty high and different than when I started out in this.
I'm curious how you feel about it. You know, I remember in the early 2010s, I found myself, you know, maybe somewhat embarrassingly, carried away by some of the more grandiose pronouncements of these companies. You know, they were going to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and make the world more open and connected. And while, you know, that was always obviously self-serving in some ways, I did talk to many employees who seemed sincerely moved by that mission. And they did talk about it all the time. And so I took them to be at least somewhat sincere. I no longer take them to be sincere about that. And I wonder, like, did you take them at their word back then? And as the sort of truth emerged, how'd you feel about it?
I mean, I think it depends on who in Silicon Valley. Honestly, I think when you're at the top of the companies, it's a whole different feeling than when you're in the middle. You know, EFF has 30,000 members. I would say the vast... I don't know, we are a privacy organization. I don't know who those are. But I think it's fair to say...
That must make fundraising hell.
