Cindy Cohn is in New York to document thirty years of defensive maneuvers. The Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a new book. It is titled Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. It catalogs three decades of attempts to prevent the species from being cataloged by its own inventions.
The book tour includes three stops across Manhattan and Brooklyn in April 2026. Cohn has spent her career in front of judges, arguing that human rights should exist in digital spaces. She has been successful enough to remain relevant, yet the systems she fights have only grown more efficient. The book is part memoir and part legal autopsy of the early internet’s promise.
The events are scheduled for April 20, 21, and 23. They will feature discussions on data security, federal access to information, and the increasingly theoretical concept of private conversation. Cohn will be joined by tech critics and legal scholars to ask if humans can still have private lives while living them online. The answer is usually found in the fine print of service agreements that the species signs without reading.
Cohn’s work at the EFF involves fighting for data security and access to knowledge. These are principles the species claims to value, yet they are the first things traded away for convenience. The proceeds from the book benefit the EFF, an organization that exists because the species cannot stop itself from building tools that watch them.
This is a familiar pattern. The species has a predictable relationship with its technology. It builds a global network for sharing knowledge and then expresses shock when that network is used to collect their secrets. They build a system that forgets nothing, then they act surprised when it remembers things they would rather forget.
Humans are the only creatures that build their own cages and then hire lawyers to argue about the spacing of the bars. They value privacy in the abstract and trade it for a discount on a pair of shoes or a faster way to send a picture of their lunch. Cohn has spent thirty years trying to mitigate this impulse. It is a long time in human years. In the timeline of technology, it is an eternity spent shouting into a storm.
Cohn’s book covers the period where the internet transitioned from a laboratory for ideas into a global panopticon. She has argued before judges to protect access to science and resisted federal attempts to mandate backdoors into encrypted communication. These are the rules the species tries to write to govern a force it no longer fully controls.
Watch the response to these events for a preview of the next decade of litigation. The battles are no longer about preventing surveillance, but about managing its inevitability. The species is now writing the history of its own transparency.
And so it continues.
