[00:00:14] Chris Freeland: We live so much of our lives online, sharing messages, building relationships, expressing who we are, but the ability to speak privately in those online spaces has never been guaranteed. It's been shaped by court battles, policy fights, and by the people willing to challenge expanding surveillance. So if privacy isn't just a relic of the analog past, but a cornerstone of free expression in our digital future, what do we lose when it's threatened?

Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive. Welcome to today's book Talk. In Privacy's defender, Cindy Cohn traces three pivotal legal battles that helped define digital privacy and shape the internet as we know it today, she weaves her own story together with the rise of the digital rights movement and the growth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she serves as executive director.

Cindy will be in conversation with Rainey Reitman, the co-founder of The Freedom of the Press Foundation. Let's hear now from Dave Hansen, the Executive Director of Authors Alliance. 

[00:01:16] Dave Hansen: Thanks, Chris, and as always, we're really happy to co-host this series, in particular, this book we're excited about. You know, I think for those of you who are familiar with Authors Alliance, you know that privacy and freedom from surveillance is incredibly important for authors who are trying to do research and trying to write in an environment where they feel like they don't have someone looking over their shoulder all the time.

This is one of the reasons why we've. Been so supportive of libraries and the privacy enhancing role that, that they serve, and also why we are a really big fan of the work that Cindy and everybody else at the Electronic Frontier Foundation does. So thank you for joining us today, and I'll just do some brief intros and then hand it over to Cindy and Rainey.

First, let me introduce Rainey Reitman is a writer and civil liberties advocate. She co-founded and serves as president of the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She worked for Electronic Frontier Foundation for 11 years. First as the activism director and then as chief program officer.

Her advocacy has focused on defending the rights of whistleblowers, fighting mass government surveillance, and investigating how limiting access to financial services has been used to silence speakers. So Promo Rainy has a book coming out here in the future titled Transaction Denied that explores the speech implications of corporate financial policies, and we're really looking forward to that one.

So Rainey will be in conversation with Cindy Cohn, who I could go on and on with a bio for Cindy. She is the executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2000 to 2015. She served as EFF'S legal director, as well as its general counsel, and she first became involved with Eef F way back in 1993 when EFF asked her to serve.

As outside lead attorney in Bernstein versus Department of Justice, which I hope we'll hear a little bit about here, A successful First Amendment challenge to us. Export restrictions on cryptography. She has many awards. I always enjoy looking at people's bios for these, and my favorite that I found was a national law journal naming her one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America with this quote.

They said, if Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn. So with that, I will turn it over to Cindy and Rainey. Take us away. 

[00:03:42] Rainey: Thank you so much, Dave and Chris and Cindy. Wow. I am just so excited to be in this conversation with you and just I wanna start off with. Huge congratulations on this fantastic book, privacy Defender, and before I dig into everything that this book covers, which is, you know, fantastic, why don't we just take a step back and I know you are so committed to creative comments, licensing, and I know that's something that EFF has worked so much on, and here you are publishing a book and that is such a difficult spot with publishers to be able to navigate that in a way that it's alignment with your ethics and those licensing agreements. How did you thread that needle? 

[00:04:25] Cindy: Well, I would say that, you know, I had to stop at one point in time. I was actually on a pathway. I was talking to a normal agent, and honestly, it was a conversation with Brewster Kahle that made me realize that I was on a pathway that was gonna end up not.

Creating a CC licensed version of this book and that that was very inconsistent with my values and also, you know, who EFF is in the world, and Brewster really encouraged me to think hard about that, and he was totally right. As a result of that, we started looking around for a publisher that would be supportive of a CC license.

Version and that took us from the kind of mainstream commercial publishers into the academic publishing world. And ultimately we were able to reach an agreement with MIT press. That will mean that the book, and I also had to reach an agreement with the audio book version, that it will be under a regular license for a year, and then it'll switch.

To a CC license. So it'll be open license in about a year. It comes out on March 10th. So, you know, March 10th, 2027, I think we're gonna have another celebration when we have a CC license version. But it really did take a lot more thinking and awareness than, you know, I work on these issues on the policy side and the legal side, but as a writer and an author, I had to put on a whole different hat to make it happen.

And you know, luckily thanks to the work that Creative Commons has done and Wikipedia and the Author's Alliance, there was a pathway. And one that you know, seems, you know, fairly reasonable. I would've liked to CC licensed it from the jump, but I understand the concerns about a publisher needing a little closed time to get their money back before we go open.

So that's where we ended up and I'm pretty happy with it. Again, I would love in the future for us to recognize it. Open isn't actually in conflict with closed and that open is better, but this is what we're doing in the meantime. 

[00:06:19] Rainey: Well, I'm glad that you were able to find a way forward working with a publisher.

I just wanna appreciate MIT press for finding a way forward so we could have this, you know, eventually be under a Creative Commons license. So this book, it really traces your trajectory over 30 years, taking on some of the biggest cases that defined internet privacy for our generation and probably for many future generations.

It traces your own life. It traces the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So it's doing a lot in a relatively slim book. And I wanna kind of go back to some of the earliest parts of the book that really stuck with me. And I was really struck by how young and frankly, early career you were when you were first approached about the Bernstein case.

Can you talk about what was this case about and what was going through your head? When you first got that call about the Bernstein case. 

[00:07:17] Cindy: I was a relatively young lawyer. I'd spent some time at the UN on a fellowship and I'd spent about a year in private practice in San Francisco. And honestly, I knew John as a personal friend and, John Gilmore, who called me to ask me about the case. And I had been watching him and some of the other early kind of internet hacker scene. People start to, you know, really start to talk about what the internet was gonna look like when, you know everybody in the world had access to this technology that.

You know, this is 1994, so you know, this is before there was a worldwide web. So the people who were on the internet were largely people in academia, government or other big institutions. It wasn't available for regular users yet, really, but they were already thinking ahead. And so when John called me and asked me if I would take a case, that was gonna be one of the very first cases.

Kind of deal with what was going on in this new internet. I thought it was really exciting, and I thought it was a chance to really put a marker down that this new space that we were all gonna be moving into needed to be a place that had our constitutional rights intact, that we couldn't have a shrunken constitution as we moved online.

We needed to have as big, if not a bigger one. 

[00:08:32] Rainey: And the heart of that case was about access to encryption, is that right? 

[00:08:37] Cindy: Yes. 

[00:08:37] Rainey: Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, one of the ideas that first came up around that encryption case, but really flowed through the whole book was about the role privacy serves in relation to governments and corporations.

How do you think people should think about privacy in that context? 

[00:08:57] Cindy: I mean, I think of privacy kind of not as a, you know, like a tarp you put over your head when you're gonna do something you don't want people to see. I think of privacy as a check on power. It's a way that people who have less power can have a zone of protection from the people who have more power, who might want to.

Repress them, limit their rights or stop them from gaining power. You know, we live in a country that's supposed to be self-governing, right? And if the party that is governing knows everything that's ever said by any of the subjects, or to some degree of approximation of that, you can't really marshal opposition.

You can't really have a self-governing society. So I think of privacy as one of the cornerstones of basic. Self-governing democracies and freedom, and that's, you know, I think of it in political terms. But of course that's also true in personal terms as well, that people who live in a household with somebody who's more powerful than them might need some privacy as well.

If they're dealing with something like domestic violence or L-G-B-T-Q kids or other people who, you know, don't fit in where they come from. So whether you're talking about a personal level or all the way up to a governmental level. I think of privacy as one of the ways that we limit the power of other people over us.

[00:10:17] Rainey: Right?

And that ended up kind of being a major theme as privacy is a check on power throughout the book. And the book really spent a lot of time on governmental. Incursions on privacy or attempts to undermine privacy, but as you kind of spoke towards the end of the book, this is also a little battleground when it comes to corporate efforts to intrude on privacy today.

[00:10:39] Cindy: Yeah, and the stories came up in the context of government intrusions on privacy. The government was regulating encryption, the government doing the mass NSA, spying, the government issues, national security letters. But in every step of the way, there are companies, right? The government does mass spying because it taps into at and t's networks and national security letters are attempt to go after our service providers and get information about us.

So corporate spying feeds governmental spying. Can be, you know, it's problematic in its own right for us to have some privacy. And I worry about the surveillance business model a lot, but when you add it to the government's power, then it really gets toxic at a level that is dangerous for people. So, you know, both are bad.

And then what we have right now is a world in which they're mixed together and we get both the bads plus more. 

[00:11:32] Rainey: Yeah. I also worry about the surveillance business model, Cindy. 

[00:11:36] Cindy: Yes, I know you do, but I'm excited about your book because I think you're dealing with another side effect of the lack of privacy in the context of our financial transactions, and it's all of a piece.

[00:11:48] Rainey: Yeah, it really is. So coming back to your book, you tell this really dramatic court case story of the Bernstein case and in the end you, a very early career lawyer and a and a small team, you were victorious. Can you talk about what did that victory look like and what did winning feel like for you? 

[00:12:09] Cindy: Yeah, I mean we were, we were this ragtag team.

I was a young lawyer. This case was closely followed by kind of the early hackers and the early internet. And by hackers, I mean like the old school. Term a packer. You know, somebody who hats away at a problem until they solve, it's 

[00:12:24] Rainey: a positive term. Yes. Yeah. 

[00:12:25] Cindy: It's a positive term in my world and, and I know that Hollywood has decided to make it a negative one, but I'm old school this way and we thought that this was gonna be really important and we also thought that this.

Little team of lawyers armed with the constitution and the right arguments could win against the national security infrastructure of the United States. And I would say that some of that might've been young Cindy naivete and hacker communities naivete going in. But the truth is it worked. And I think in part it worked because the courts, when they're working well, are a place where everybody.

Gets to be heard on the values of their arguments rather than the size of their pocketbook or the amount of political power they have. That's what, to me, the court's. Should serve as now. Look, people who don't have political power should also be able to be heard in the other two branches of government, the executive and the legislative.

But in the courts, traditionally, as I often said, if I file a case and I write a brief, the judge has to read my brief. In order to decide whether I'm right or not, that's not exactly true in most other parts of the government when you're trying to get yourself heard, and we were lucky that we were able to mount this case.

We were, I think, quite smart about presenting the legal arguments in the way that was. The easiest way for the judge to understand what we were doing, and we got very fortunate in the judges that heard it because I think they were open to hearing from a bunch of nobodies and ruling for us. You know, despite the fact that the word national security, it was tossed around a lot by the other side.

[00:14:03] Rainey: Yeah, I think it really felt like a David and Goliath kind of story where you have this very small group taking on, you know, the whole national security state. And this idea of the courts being a particular place with a more level playing field. And I'm curious, looking at the world we're living in today, and there's a lot of conversation about very politically appointed judges and about whether or not you can look to the Supreme Court to stick its neck out on constitutional issues, have your feeling about the court system changed over time?

[00:14:40] Cindy: Well, I don't think I was ever. Unaware that this was something that. Could go away if we weren't willing to fight for it. And if, if every other, you know, it, it's not immutable or written in stone that the courts are always gonna be the fairest place. There's plenty of repressive governments and regimes all around the world that have courts that are completely complicit in repression.

And again, I spent time in the United Nations and Center for Human Rights, so I'm pretty familiar with them. So. I think the thing that's sad and dark is that the American court system used to, while it wasn't perfect, it used to have a better average of standing up for what was right despite big power.

And now it's very rare that we see it at the Supreme Court level, but I don't wanna throw all the judges under the bus. I think there's a lot of judges who are standing up for what's right in the lower courts, district courts, and courts of appeal right now. And I think that it's incumbent on us to, to be clear about that and to stand with them.

Because they're still just human beings. I mean, just because they're in black robes and they have life tenure, it doesn't mean that they are immune to the pressures that the courts are being put under. So yeah, I think I'm sad. I don't think I've got a change of view of the courts as much as the change of view of these courts and the need to get them back.

To a place where they are willing and able to stand up for what's right, even if it's not, you know, what the powers that be want. And the US Supreme Court has been pretty disappointing, but not 100% disappointing. And so I think that we as citizens and me as a litigator who goes in front of the court, we need to continue to point out where they're wrong, but also point out where they're doing the right thing.

[00:16:19] Rainey: Speaking of sort of some of these major cases, I wanted to talk about the National Security Letters case that you described in the book, and there's so many powerful moments in this book that stuck with me. One I particularly remember was when you just literally out of the blue, got a phone call from a telecom that had gotten a very particular type of court order about their user data.

What happened? 

[00:16:46] Cindy: Yeah. I was literally, I was on Interstate 80 driving to Sacramento to do some testimony, and my phone rang and I answered it. It was going through my car. At the time, it was pretty safe, but as soon as I. Started talking to the people on the call from this little phone company that ultimately got revealed to be Credo Mobile.

I had to pull off because it was so exciting. Lawyers have this moment right where what happens to you is horrible and what it is for us is exciting 'cause we have a chance to do a fight that we didn't have to do. And this was definitely one of those moments where I was both extremely excited that we were gonna get the chance to go after these national security letters, which are.

Really more closer to subpoenas than they are court orders. 'cause there's no courts involved. Mm-hmm. And that's one of the big problems. So I was excited for us and for the world that we were gonna get to bring this case. And at the same time, I had to be extremely sympathy to my poor clients who had just.

Gotten this very scary visit from the FBIA warning about a gag order. They were worried that even calling me was violating the gag order and they could end up in jail. And so, you know, just trying to find a way to reassure them that they could talk to me because I was pretty confident that they could and be excited that we had a chance to go after national Security letters.

And since this is the podcast that the archive helps with, I do wanna point out that the. Call I got from Credo Mobile was the second time we had gotten a call about national security letters. Mm-hmm. The first time was a little while earlier and it was from the archive because they had received a national security letter.

I was just as excited the first time and it turned out that the government backed down. Right away we were all ready to go. Mm-hmm. And the government at that particular time backed down and we didn't have to fight it in court. So on some levels I felt like I'd lost my first chance, my first swipe at it.

'cause the government had gone away. And so here we were, we were gonna get another chance to swipe at it and we sure did. 

[00:18:44] Rainey: As a reader, I shared your excitement with that phone call as it's coming through. I was really, you know, it's so clear that like there was another option for Credo Mobile, which is that they could have just complied.

They could have done nothing for their users. They could have just been like, oh, this is a terrifying warning we're getting from the government. This isn't a battle that we wanna take on. We're just gonna hand over the user data and do nothing about it. And instead, they were like. Let's call Cindy and see what she advises and does she think we've got a chance to fight this, and then you had to be with them every step of the way through a pretty intense legal battle to fight it.

[00:19:22] Cindy: It took six years before we were able to tell the world that our client was Credo Mobile, and they had to have carried this the whole time. And in fact, after we sued, they got sued back by the government and claimed that they were being un-American or otherwise, you know, inhibiting and national security investigation.

I mean, that's really scary and I think it's easy to think about these things in the abstract and think that. You know, of course you would stand up and fight for what is right, but in the moment it is actually very terrifying. It's terrifying for clients and even Credo, which is a progressive phone company that doesn't pull any punches when it comes to policy arguments with the government actually taking a legal stance where you're being told that you are inhibiting a national security investigation.

It's real scary. It takes real courage. 

[00:20:11] Rainey: Yeah, and so these national security letters, they came out of the Patriot Act and you know, so many of the fights around privacy online today, they are grounded in the Patriot Act and how it changed the landscape of our laws after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and you were already a civil liberties lawyer.

When all of that went down and when the Patriot Act got passed. And I'm curious, obviously I do not want you to go through line by line on everything that changed in privacy law from the Patriot Act, but uh, at the top level, how do you think the Patriot Act transformed the privacy that they. United States?

United States? 

[00:20:48] Cindy: Well, I think that the government, and remember the Patriot Act was passed less than two months after the attacks of nine 11. We had not had the nine 11 commission, which very carefully went through and documented like what went wrong. That led to the government being, you know, this was the worst terrorist attack on US soil to date.

It was a tremendous intelligence failure and. We didn't have that information yet, so instead the government rolled out and said, oh, the problem. Is our rights. The problem is that people have too much privacy and the government doesn't have enough ability to spy on people, and that was the problem. There was a thing that in kind of national security circles and people who think about the NSA, they would talk about a wall, that there was a wall between what the NSA could do, which is charged with spying on foreigners.

Right? Originally, NSA is. Charged with trying to find foreign spies and spy on foreign, you know, both sides. It works along with the CIA, but it does the signals intelligence part of finding spies and foreign intelligence issues. And the FBI is charged with domestic investigations. Right? And so the story that they floated immediately was that this wall separating what the NSA can do and what the FBI can do is what made us.

Unsafe. It's what made September 11th possible. And you know, when you read the nine 11 attack report, that came later. You know, that's not true at all. Our rights were not the problem that led to this terrorist attack. This idea that security and privacy are on some kind of teeter-totter, and if we reduce our security, reduce our privacy, we somehow magically get more security.

Like that's not how it works. It's never been how it's worked, but that's the story that was sold to the American people. It's embedded in the Patriot Act and it's also embedded in all the secret stuff that they did at that time that we didn't discover until much later. But it, it still remains a little stunning to me that the National Security Forces of the United States, who just basically failed in a way that caused deaths and destruction across the country, turned around and told us that it was our rights that got in the way.

It's not true. It's not right. And we're still living under this sense that the more surveillance we have, the more secure we're gonna be, which just is not true. 

[00:23:13] Rainey: And speaking of the more surveillance we're gonna have, one of the really dramatic moments of this book is when a former at and t technician, Mark Klein, he literally shows up at the door of EFF in the mission carrying.

Papers and documents, and he's very excited and he's coming to you with like proof beyond a doubt that At&t has been directly collaborating with the US government on mass surveillance. And then can you just explain what did you do with those documents that you got from Mark Klein? 

[00:23:53] Cindy: Yeah, it was really crazy.

I mean, he literally knocked on our door and said, Sherry Steele, who was the executive director at the time, answered the door on Shotwell Street here in San Francisco, and he said, do you people care about privacy? And Sherry said, well, we do. And he said, I used to work at the at and t building on Folsom Street.

I think I know how they're doing the mass spying, and I have the schematics. And as you said, he showed up with papers showing the schematics for how they were doing the mass spying. I mean. I would say that we were stunned. We had lots of rumors that stuff like this was going on. The New York Times had recently presented a story about the mass spying that that made headlines all around the world.

But here's a guy showing up and giving us the actual schematics and pictures. Pictures of the Secret Room, room 6 41 A in Folsom Street, and how the technology works, you know, involving, you know, nuts. Deep technology, but fiber optic splitters and a splitter cabinet and things like that. And that we were looking for information that we could use in court.

And it was very frustrating for us that we couldn't get any. But suddenly this guy shows up and he's got actually how it works right there. And he knew that's what had happened. So it was a stunning moment. And you know, we were already working on a lawsuit based on the New York Times. Story, and we were already deciding that we were gonna sue the phone companies because of the strategically, it was a lot easier to sue them than it was to sue the government over the spying that the New York Times had reported on.

But then Mark showed up and just handed us. You know, the pieces that we needed to be able to turn, you know, what was a news story into evidence that we could present in a court of law, and we pretty quickly filed, we put it together and we filed. 

[00:25:41] Rainey: And the story of that lawsuit is incredible. And really, you get into detail in this book, which we don't have time to dig into all the details now, so I'll ask you instead, you know, what lessons do you think, and I'll just, you know, to, to set the context where you, you had all these really intense battles in the 1990s and it feels like they were very much a preview of the battles we're facing today around executive overreach and surveillance.

The militarization of the police and the really sophisticated use of technology by both governments and corporations. And do you think there are certain lessons that we can take from those early fights for internet freedom as we move into a time that can feel honestly very daunting when it comes to defending civil libert?

[00:26:28] Cindy: Yeah, it really is. It's a very trying time right now, and I think the first lesson is encryption has to be protected. It has to be our friends. It is the bedrock on which all privacy and honestly all security online. I mean, even if you're not worried about the US government or the corporations and instead you might be worried about foreign spies or other, you know, data breaches, things like that.

Encryption is the central technology that helps, gives us. Both privacy and security as end users online, and it has to be sacrosanct. It has to be something that cannot come under attack, and that's really the lesson of the 1990s in the encryption battle in the Bernstein case, you know, later when Mr.

Snowden came out with his revelations, we learned that the government was continuing to try to undermine encryption in ways that were even beyond what we had feared. So this is an ongoing fight and one that we have to continue to stand up for. But overall, the thing that we have worried about is that, you know, national security as an argument by the government has kind of become this all purpose hammer that they use.

Mm-hmm. To every single problem. And again, this was not pioneered by the Trump administration, but we're seeing it a lot more now where the A EPA International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which was in the trade, the tariff decision that recently came down, but also the Alien Enemies Act and all sorts of other things.

Are all the national security holes that we have built into our constitutional and legal framework. This is the lever that they are using to build this surveillance state around us, and we need to plug those holes again. We did it once before, you know, the original fisa, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Was passed after it was discovered that the Nixon administration was spying on. Mm-hmm. People, both anti-war people and ultimately their political opponents on the Democratic side. You know, Congress stepped in and built us some protections. Now they didn't go far enough, and we've whittled those away over the years.

But, you know, we do need another reset like that where we're really gonna try to bring the national security arguments under some kind of, you know, real rule of law. And then in terms of the surveillance state that we're seeing right now being built all over, we have to get back to centering the users and making sure that whatever the business model is or the government arguments are, that we have strong protections and create this privacy that we need in order to be self-governing and protect ourselves.

[00:28:59] Rainey: And one of the. Best ways to do that is by helping support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who's at the front of this battle, and every book that someone buys directly benefits, EFF. And I'd love to hear like if people are finding out about this and they're excited, where can they learn more? How can they get involved?

What's the most useful thing for them to do? 

[00:29:21] Cindy: I mean, obviously EFF stands on the shoulders of the 30,000 people who join us and give us money. Every year we have a sophisticated staff of lawyers and technologists and activists who are good at what they do because they get to do it full time. So. Being one of the people whose shoulders we get to stand on by supporting us financially is tremendously important.

We have tech projects. We're helping to encrypt the web. We are helping to block third party cookies. They're all open source projects that need help. So there's help that people can give in that as well. And then just being active in your community. You know, a lot of people right now are wanting to learn about digital security.

How can I go to a protest? How can I help my friends who might be hiding in their house? How can I do protect? Did support or get the support I need. And we have a set of materials up on the website called Security Self-Defense that can help you figure out how to protect yourself. And again, I, I think people in the internet archive audience, a good chunk of you are the kind of people who can help others learn how to protect themselves as well.

So those are all things that people can do. And then of course, get involved. We have an action center where we. Write to Congress, or we write to the administration and try to help influence. You know, right now we have a pretty hostile administration and Congress that is somewhat clueless about what we need to do right now.

There's a lot of room for people's voices to be heard, especially around some of the surveillance based answers to questions. Mm-hmm. That we're starting to see this idea that, you know, if we just put up cameras everywhere, and these are fights you can do locally as well as. Statewide as well as nationally and even internationally, you know, stand up and say surveillance isn't what the way to go to make us safer.

We've seen these license plate reader cameras go by a company called Flock, and then some others are provided by Motorola that are being used by people who are trying to track down people seeking reproductive health. They're being used to try to track. Down people who might be subjected to ICE raids this information.

If we, we use the safety frame to surveil ourselves. We cannot control how that's gonna be used against us, and we're already seeing really horrible things as a result. So whether you're involved locally or statewide or nationally getting involved so that your voice is heard a about standing up for privacy right now, it's more important than ever.

[00:31:51] Rainey: Yeah. And you know, you've always been a real inspiration to me, Cindy, and a mentor of mine, and you taught me this idea of privacy as a team sport. This idea that you are, it's not just you, it's your whole community that you're trying to get to be more private. Cindy, this has been so wonderful and before I let you go, is there anything else you wanted to say that I missed that you wanted to cover before we wrap up?

[00:32:14] Cindy: You know, just a couple of things. First of all, I really wanna thank you, Rainey. 'cause people may not know this, but Rainey was my accountability coach for writing this book, and it would not have been written given my day job as executive director of EFF, if it worked for Rainey, making sure that I showed up and got.

This work done. So really big thanks back to you, and I'm very excited about your book as well. As I said, I think we're both in the business of trying to help protect people and have, help people understand how important their privacy is, and I was really happy to do this and I was happy to do it. You know, I wrote it as a memoir, right?

I mean, lots of people who are journalists or activists or otherwise researchers, they write books about privacy, and they're tremendously important. They're some of my heroes, but. I, I tried to make this more my lived story, uh, and because I think that I wanted, I was hoping that it might inspire a few people to think, well, I could have a life that was interesting like this too.

And so part of my audience for this is people who are interested in trying to get involved and make the world better and might not know how, because I. Didn't start off with a 30 year plan to fight surveillance. I just took opportunities as I came along and was lucky enough to get to build them, but you can too.

And so I think the other piece I just wanted to say is I intentionally wrote this book not as a academic or even journalistic story about privacy, but a very personal story about standing up for what's right. 

[00:33:43] Rainey: Cindy Cohn, author of Privacy's Defender, and you can check out EFF and order a copy. Thank you so much.

[00:33:51] Cindy: Thank you Rainey.

[00:33:52] Chris Freeland: Thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow I.