My name is Peter Maravealis. I'm the events director here at City Lights. And for those of you online, thank you for joining us as well. And as always, we are beaming to you from the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush people. It is always a pleasure and an honor to do so. So, it is always fabulous to have Electronic Frontier Foundation in the house.
They are the co-sponsor of tonight's event. And of course, we are thrilled to have Cindy Cohn with us celebrating her new book.
It is called Privacy's Defender: My 30-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. It is, of course, produced by our friends over at the MIT Press, and it chronicles Cindy's 30-year battle to protect our rights to digital privacy and shows us just how central this is to all of our rights and our ability to organize and make change in the world.
This book arrives to us at a very important moment. Cindy is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2000 to 2015. She served as the EFF's legal director as well as the general counsel. Today, she spearheads a team of more than 120 lawyers, activists, and technologists who are dedicated to ensuring that technology supports speech, privacy, and innovation for all.
Joining her tonight in conversation is none other than Cory Doctorow, who is of course no stranger to many of you and to City Lights. You can learn more about his work at craphound.com. Of course, he's a fiction writer, activist, journalist. His most recent book is called Enshittification and it can be found at the front counter. And also he's got a new book coming out in June. It's called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. So they're going to be in conversation tonight. We're going to have a Q&A at the end. We ask that you raise your hand. There will also be a signing. I will have these handy dandy Post-its to hand to you and we would like you to write to whom you would like the book inscribed. You may buy them at the front counter and then just kind of line up over on this side of the room. And there is also lots of EFF swag at the front counter. So please check that out. There are stickers, literature. So without much more ado, welcome to City Lights to you both.
I just want to say what an honor it is to get to launch my book at City Lights. I mean, this is just an iconic place. It was one of the first places I came when I moved to San Francisco and I'm just thrilled beyond words that we're able to do this here.
It is a fantastic bookstore. Thank you all for coming. I am a recovering bookseller myself and I always know when I do events at stores that even in a city like San Francisco, it is not automatic that you get great independent bookstores. We both have our books here. I have a child in college in the UC system. I would like it if my books sold, but you don't have to buy my books. You can buy a book because that's how this store stays open. And so I hope you will help support independent book selling because it's a very important part of our culture. So the order of service tonight, as you heard, Cindy and I are going to talk about her book for about 40 minutes. We're going to open it to questions and answers. A good question has one part, not two. And it's not more of a comment than a question. And then when we're done, because Cindy and I use the internet a lot, we've been able to order these devices from the internet that make books non-returnable, and we're going to be making demonstrations of them for you. So, you can just bring your books up and we'll show you how they work. So, Cindy, you have written your first book, and it's a memoir, and the traditional opening question in one of these things is, tell me about your book.
Well, my book is really a set of stories about the work that I've done on behalf of EFF trying to stand up for privacy. And there are three sets of stories in the book. The first one is about what people sometimes call the crypto wars, which was work that we did to free up encryption technology from government control in the 1990s. It's also a bit of an alternative history of the early internet because I have to admit I got a little frustrated that all of the early histories of the internet were about guys and the corporations and businesses that they started. And while that certainly happened in the '90s, I was getting grumpy about it. And I decided that since I was there too, I would try to tell a little richer history of those times because a lot more happened than just the founding of a couple of companies. And the second set of stories are about the fight that EFF engaged in to try to stop the NSA from spying on us on the internet. That features a couple of whistleblowers, one you may not have heard of named Mark Klein, who you should have heard about by the time we're done, and another who you probably have heard about named Ed Snowden, who appeared to help us get standing in the case. And then the third set of cases are about what we call national security letters, which are a form of subpoena, secret subpoena that gags the recipients, that became kind of a go-to tool for the FBI after September 11th and gagged people forever from being able to say that they had received one. And so we fought a long set of cases to try to do that where our clients remained a secret for over six years. So I tell all of those stories, but I also kind of try to talk about what it's like to spend your life trying to stand up for privacy or anything, and include some of the lessons that I've learned about how to do this for the long run, as well as some of the kind of crazy personal things that happened along the way. And my hope is that it can inspire some people to think that this is something that they could do as well, because these are long fights, and it's important that people stick with them, and if you do, really amazing things can happen in your life as well.
There's an element of this memoir, and it's a very good book, I should say. I read it with a great deal of excitement and pleasure, and even having been in many of the events described, I found that getting your perspective on them and the way that you wove that into your own personal story, it was very exciting. But there is an aspect of this memoir that shares some DNA with other early internet histories, which is to say it's a story about people building the airplane while they're flying it. You're inventing this new category of digital rights law along with a cohort of colleagues who are brilliant and inspired and doing cool things. And you know, you just said, well, you're hoping that this inspires other people. I'd love to hear you reflect on what it's like to invent a new kind of career that has a great deal of meaning, is very hard, has very high stakes, and maybe you could reflect on what that means now as we're seeing the rule of law in decline, and people are trying to figure out what they need to do to kind of, we were talking earlier, have a republic if you can keep it, right?
Yeah. I mean, it is the case, and this is something that, you know, EFF's 125 people now, and it's one of the things that I will say a lot, and many of you are in my staff meetings weekly and you hear me say this, which is like, we're just making this up as we go along, right? We're pushing, we're trying to figure out what works. We're certainly learning from the people who came before us, and I absolutely modeled the way EFF thinks about impact litigation on a lot of the work at our friends at the ACLU and other places. But really, we really did just make it up as we go along and tried to figure out what's the best way to go from here. And I think we're definitely in a time when we need that. I think that we're in a time where the institutions that we relied on to get some of the relief that we got are themselves under attack and we may need to shift gears and try to spend some time really standing up for those institutions and helping rebuild them. And new tactics and strategies, right? EFF was the first organization to really, you know, hire a staff technologist. Seth Schoen, who's here tonight, was the first one who we hired to have technologists kind of, you know, riding along with us and explaining to us how things work. And believe me, he's the most patient man in the world to explain to me and all the other EFF lawyers how the internet works. But kind of thinking about that, like, what are the tools we need to be able to go into this new space and really understand it and then translate that out so that judges and people who aren't deep in the tech can understand it well enough to make the right decisions. And I think we're in another time where we need to be innovative and creative around those kinds of things. I think one of the differences now is that some of the times when we would show up in the early '90s, like, people didn't have any idea what we were talking about and there wasn't really anybody on the other side who understood what we were talking about either. I used to joke that I'm a lawyer from the future and I'm here to explain the internet to you. Now there is a really dedicated set of people who do not want the same future we do, and they are advocating too. So we don't have the benefit of being kind of the only people from the future anymore. There are alternate futures and we need to stand up for the one that actually stands with users.
Do you have a theory about why EFF was able to kind of invent its organization so well over the years? I mean, it's not like we didn't have missteps and it's not like we didn't lose cases, but you know, as you say, it's 125 people. So when I met EFF, I was a carpetbagger who'd moved to San Francisco with a startup. And EFF had just been evicted because people like me kept moving to San Francisco with a startup. And my startup had an extra office. So we moved EFF into the office. And then I quit working for my startup and started working for EFF. And but there were six EFFers at the time and now there's 125. So what is it? Just that we caught the tailwind of the internet? Did we have something? Did we have an insight or a set of principles or did we lock into an institutional structure? What was it that let EFF continue to be relevant and to attract so many individual small-money donors that let us be very independent and have all those kind of structural advantages too?
I mean, I think we did get, I don't know if it's lucky, but like we grew along with the internet, right? And we also diversified along with the internet. EFF doesn't look like it looked when we were starting. We have a much wider range of people with a much wider range of perspectives because the internet requires that now at a level that maybe, you know, it was kind of a little bit of a plaything of journalists and academics and things when we started. So I think we've grown and we've broadened along with the internet and the issues that we've taken on have broadened as well. I think that we have been really lucky in that, you know, EFF has 30,000 dues-paying members and they stick with us. I think there is a way in which EFF is an identity as well as a thing that you join. It's a way that you show that you understand about tech, you care about tech, and you also care about tech for good. People say tech for good now and it's kind of become hack night, but I think it's actually for the core people who supported us year after year, they recognize that we need to have people there who are standing up for the users of the internet, and in order to do that, we need them to be able to feel stable.
Yeah, I always say information doesn't want to be free, but people do.
So when we started, when you started with your privacy cases, maybe you could recap the Bernstein case a little here, but when you start with your privacy cases, they were mostly about government surveillance. Subsequently, we had some cases and campaigns around private surveillance. And then these days, as we're seeing with the Trump administration, there's not really a difference, right? The ad tech data that's collected to, you know, eke out a few basis points in conversion rates for display ads is now being used to figure out who to round up and extraordinarily rendition to a torture camp. So I wonder if you could think about the historic antecedents for this. Did we, I think we understood this early on. I don't know that everyone else understood it. What is the relationship of state and private surveillance?
I mean, it's always been the case, and I'm happy to, I'll go back and talk about Bernstein because that is a little different, but certainly the NSA surveillance, the NSA didn't come to you guys, didn't come to people directly in order to get access to everybody's information. They went to the phone companies and they went to the internet companies. It's always been the case that if you needed to do mass surveillance, you went to the companies. I think what we're seeing now, you know, I feel a little like Cassandra sometimes, right, that we've been seeing things coming that now everybody's able to see, which is that the government is really able to weaponize the information that it has about us, and they are the number one purchaser from data brokers as well. So they're able to take both the information that they've collected, say, you know, what you've given to the IRS and hand it to ICE. So inside the government, handing information around, but also purchasing from the data broker world. So now they purchase from them. It used to be that they'd hand them mass subpoenas, but either way, the government has always been hungry for the information that the private companies gather about us. So I don't think there ever was a big difference. People used to ask me, you know, are you more worried about the big tech companies or the government? And I would be like, you do not understand the problem if you think we have this choice because we don't. Now, I think that's very readily apparent. And the Trump administration has really taken what used to be a little more subtle and hidden and made it not at all. And so I think it's always been the case. You know, and they're both problems, right? I mean, I think even if it was just consumer privacy, we're now living in a world on the consumer side where the price you pay for things can be increasingly dependent on all the other things that they know about you, so that they price it at the maximum amount you will pay.
And the wage you're paying increasingly.
Whether you get a mortgage and, you know, and those kinds of things. So I think people are starting to feel how surveillance capitalism can be marshaled against them as well. So even if it were just that, that would be a problem. But, you know, I've always, I'm kind of a, you know, it's old school civil liberties are really about the government and the government's ability to, you know, pull you off the street, take you away from your family, either deport you or put you in jail. And that matters too. They both matter. And I will never ever choose. They're both bad.
And about Bernstein, could you just recap that?
Sure. So the Bernstein case is how I got dragged into all of this. And, you know, I moved to San Francisco. I started meeting a bunch of people and literally they showed up at a party in my house, a bunch of people who were on the internet. And this is, you know, 1990. This is before the World Wide Web. And so these were people, some of you are of this era, you know, typing in green letters on a black screen. But they were involved in the internet before there was a World Wide Web and enjoying, you know, this idea of instantaneous communication with people all around the world. And, you know, at that time, you know, I remember counting my pennies so I could figure out when I lived in London how long I could talk to my mom for before it got bad, right, before I couldn't afford it anymore. Having that erased was revolutionary at a level that I think it's hard for people to understand right now, but they were doing it and they were really living online and I thought it was really cool. And then one day, one of those guys, a guy named John Gilmore, who's one of the founders of EFF, called me up and he said, 'So we've got this guy, he's a math PhD student, and he wants to publish a computer program on the internet, and if he does, the government says he'll go to jail as an arms dealer.' And I said, 'Well, what does it do? Does it blow things up?' And he said, 'No, it keeps things secret.' And I said, 'Well, that sounds like a First Amendment problem to me.' And he said, 'Me too. Will you take the case?' And I was a baby lawyer at this time. I didn't know what I was doing, but I went to my little law firm and I said, 'I think this internet thing is going to be big.' Understatement of the year. And they let me take the case pro bono and we challenged the government's restrictions on this technology, which is called encryption, which turns out to be very central for both privacy and security online. We challenged the government under a First Amendment theory. For the legal geeks, it's the prior restraint part because it was a licensing scheme. And lo and behold, we won with this kind of ragtag team of lawyers and a lot of crazy hackers who showed up at the hearing and talked in public and organized and, you know, people were putting encryption on T-shirts and I think one guy actually got a tattoo and kind of just demonstrating that like computer programs and computer code was a way of communicating to other people and it had to be the case that this was protected by the First Amendment. And, you know, this is one of the things that I like about courts is that, you know, we were nobodies. But yet the judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, not too far from here in federal district court, she read our briefs and she said, 'Lo and behold, these people are right,' and we won against the national security infrastructure of the United States. And so it's because of that case and a lot of lobbying and a lot of other people, I got to stand in front of the judges, but I was by no means alone in this. And my friend Brian Behlendorf back there, he wrote a declaration for us back in the day. And we were able to succeed in the district court, succeed in the Ninth Circuit, and ultimately the government backed down and reduced the controls on the encryption. And, you know, we don't have enough security on the internet right now, but a huge chunk of the security we do have is because we were able to free up encryption. And if you use Signal, you use encryption. If you go to your bank's website and it actually goes to your bank and not somebody else pretending to be your bank, that's because of encryption happening on the back end through a group called Let's Encrypt that EFF helped sponsor. So both the stuff that you know you're using and the stuff that's below what you can see, encryption is how we have basic security and privacy online. And it's because of that fight that was presented to me to do, and I was very honored to do it. But it's because of some of these early hacker types who saw that we weren't going to be able to have a private conversation online, and we weren't going to be able to have a hope of a private conversation online unless we could free up this technology.
Oh, and I want to say one other use for encryption that I always mention here is when you get an update for the software in your pacemaker, you're also relying on encryption to make sure that it's the right software. So, lots of ways in which you're using encryption, your anti-lock brake system, the electronic lock in your home, all of those things also, you're relying on encryption for the integrity of that software.
So a recurring theme in the book and tonight is the role of narrative. You talked about Seth explaining things. You talk about explaining things to the judge in the book. And narrative, it's, you know, you're telling good stories in the book. You've woven in a narrative of your own life and your growing up adopted and growing up in the Midwest and all these other things, but narrative just doesn't always work or there are lots of different kinds of narrative. And I think the Bernstein case really illustrates something interesting for me about what a lawyer brings to the table in this because prior to the legal argument about the First Amendment, there were lots of arguments about encryption in the halls of power, right? There were arguments like we don't think that the encryption that the US government wants to allow civilians to use is strong enough and we think that bad guys will be able to break it. And sort of in the halls of power, it's like, well, yes, but the NSA has hired a large plurality of every PhD mathematician from the Big Ten and the Ivies and they say you're wrong, so I think you're wrong. And then we tried to prove it and John is back there. I just saw...
That's the guy who called me.
And he built a computer called Deep Crack that could crack all of the possible combinations of this encryption system in like two and a half hours. It was like a four million dollar computer currently sitting under my desk at home because John was tired of having it in his garage at the Hay. And it's a beautiful machine and it was an incredible demonstration, right? The fact that for a quarter million dollars, one guy could expose the secrets of every American business and individual and the state itself. But again, that didn't move the needle. And what ended up moving the needle was what I think to a lot of people sounded like and maybe even still sounds like a weird argument, which is that the First Amendment protects computer code. And yet you had that insight and you were able to explain it. So could you talk about the different kinds of narratives that we use when we try to advance policy questions and which ones work when?
Oh boy, that's hard because it really is very context dependent. I mean, I will say that the code as speech argument is one of the things that came to me that we then helped develop out and contextualize. You know, it came from really listening to people who were on the internet, especially people who were doing encryption code, but people more generally. Like we, you know, we had Hal Abelson, who is a very storied professor at MIT, taught the intro to computer science class there. And Hal, also a very patient man, sat and talked with me about like why code. He said code is primarily for people to speak to each other, it's only secondarily for computers, right? Like this frame was how people were working on the internet and the development of the science. And, you know, people think about the First Amendment about political speech or about art. But the development of science is one of the core pieces of the First Amendment. It's why freedom of expression, one of the reasons why freedom of expression is really, really important. And so it just became clear to me in talking to all of these people what they were doing and how it fit into the frame of the law. And so that's the story that we put together. And it started with Dan, right? He was a computer science PhD student who wanted to publish his ideas on the internet so other people could look at them, think about them, talk about them, and comment on them. I mean, that's just what the First Amendment is. So I think that for me anyway, in all of the narratives of the cases in the mass spying cases, talking about how, you know, the founders of this country didn't like general warrants. They didn't like the idea that the police could just show up, you know, could get a warrant based on the fact that somebody wasn't paying their taxes and then use that warrant to search whoever they wanted. Right? That's the history of the Fourth Amendment. Well, what's going on when the NSA is tapping into the internet, they're looking at everything first and figuring out what they want to investigate second. So I think in all of these situations, you have to kind of really take the time to look at what's going on and then how does it relate to the values that are embedded in the law and then make that argument.
So I think one of the things that narrative does that's very important is it connects what seem to be disparate phenomena over time and makes a coherent narrative out of them, a coherent story out of them. And you've just done this, right? You've talked about the framers and general warrants and then the Fourth Amendment. I think that, you know, we have an unfortunate tendency as a society to lack object permanence and to be like toddlers who still think peekaboo is cool and to just wake up one day and say Trump has no antecedents. How did we end up in a situation where authoritarians are using the threat of an enemy within to sideline the Bill of Rights and using technology to do it and arguing that technology gives us a unique way to head off existential threats to society? I joined EFF months after 9/11. To me, I feel like I was here once before. Could you talk about maybe the historic antecedents to this moment in the Patriot Act and in other fights that we had and how, you know, this is just sort of the son and grandson of those fights?
