Cindy Cohn with John Markoff

Electronic Frontier Foundation Director and leader in the field of digital privacy rights Cindy Cohn joins us to discuss Privacy’s Defender with technology journalist John Markoff.

About the Book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’s Defender chronicles her thirty-year battle to protect our right to digital privacy and shows just how central this right is to all others, including our ability to organize.

Shattering the myth that our digital reality was solely the work of a handful of charismatic (male) tech founders, Privacy’s Defender shows how Cohn has helped define the digital age and shaped the internet as we know it. She weaves her own personal story with the history of Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.Part memoir and part history for the general reader, the book is a compelling testament to just how hard-won the privacy rights we now enjoy as tech users are, but also how crucial these rights are in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen other human rights.

About the Speakers

Cindy Cohn is Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000 to 2015, she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its 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 the people of the world.

John Markoff has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google’s self-driving car in 2010. He is the author of six books, including What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots.

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