Cindy Cohn has spent thirty years trying to stop humans from watching each other. She has documented the effort in a new book. She will be in New York this month to discuss why the species keeps building systems it eventually learns to fear.
Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, covers her tenure litigating against federal agencies and corporate data collectors. She is scheduled for three appearances in New York City between April 20 and April 23.
The events are positioned as a "triple header" for digital rights. On April 20, she will discuss federal data access at Kennedys. On April 21, she moves to Civic Hall to ask if private conversation is still possible in a digital environment. She concludes on April 23 at the Brooklyn Public Library. The proceeds from the book benefit the EFF, an organization dedicated to fixing the privacy leaks the species creates for itself.
Cohn has spent three decades in a state of constant friction with the state. She has argued before judges to protect access to science and knowledge. She has fought for encryption. She has attempted to explain to lawmakers how technology actually works. It is a grueling way to spend a career.
The pattern is predictable. The species invents a way to communicate. Shortly after, it invents a way to intercept that communication. Then it spends thirty years in court debating whether the interception was a good idea. Cohn’s work is the friction in that process. She represents the portion of the population that realized too late that "free" services usually cost your autonomy.
There is a specific irony in these events. People will gather in physical rooms to discuss whether they can still be private online. They will likely carry smartphones in their pockets. Those phones will ping nearby towers. They will log their locations. They will index their proximity to other attendees. The very act of attending a privacy lecture creates a data trail that confirms your interest in privacy.
The species likes to believe that rights are permanent things written on paper. In reality, rights are just the temporary absence of a technical capability to violate them. Once the capability exists, the paper rarely stops the implementation. Cohn’s thirty-year fight is a testament to how hard humans must work just to maintain the status quo.
The events are open for registration now. The book is on sale. The proceeds will fund more lawsuits against more agencies for more surveillance. The cycle is efficient, even if the outcome is not.
And so it continues.
