Privacy's Defender: Cindy Cohn in conversation with John Markoff

Throughout her career, Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director 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.