sharing fannish enthusiasm

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/12/the-big-idea-cindy-cohn/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59775

When you’re trying to get folks excited about their own digital rights, a lot will depend on the examples you give them to understand the fight. As the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn certainly has examples. But which ones to choose? In this Big Idea for Privacy’s Defender, Cohn offers up her choices and explains why they matter.

CINDY COHN:

Do we have the right to have a private conversation online? 

In this age of constant, pervasive surveillance, both government and corporate, how do you get people to believe that they can and should have that right? 

And how do you show that safeguarding privacy is part of safeguarding a free, open and democratic society? 

In Privacy’s Defender, my Big Idea is that by telling some rollicking stories about my three big fights for digital privacy over the past 30 years, I might inspire people not only to understand why privacy matters, but to actually start fighting for it themselves. 

The challenge was different for each of the three stories I told. The first one, about cryptography, was in many ways the easiest, since it had a pretty straightforward narrative.  Before the beginning of the broad public internet, in the early 1990s, I led a ragtag bunch of hackers and lawyers who sued to fight a federal law that treated encryption – specifically “software with the capability of maintaining secrecy” – as a weapon. We argued that code is speech and put together a case based on the First Amendment. By pulling in help from academics, scientists, companies and others, and by the grace of several women judges who were willing to listen to us in spite of the government’s national security claims on the other side, we won.

Many other stories from the early public internet are about men and the products they built. This one is different: It tells how some scruffy underdogs beat the national security infrastructure and brought all of us the promise of a more secure internet. But it’s otherwise kind of a hero’s tale with a dramatic ending when I was called to DC to negotiate the government’s surrender. 

The second and third stories don’t end in such clean wins, which perhaps makes them more typical of how actual change happens when you are up against the government.

The second set of stories are about the cases we brought against the National Security Agency’s mass spying,  starting after the New York Times revealed in late 2005 that the government was spying on Americans on our home soil. The fight was  pushed forward by a whistleblower named Mark Klein who literally knocked on our front door at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in early 2006 with details of how the NSA was tapping into the internet’s backbone at key junctures, including in a secret room in an AT&T building  in downtown San Francisco.  This is the most cloak-and-dagger of the stories, made possible both by Mark’s courage and that of Edward Snowden, who revealed even more about the NSA spying in 2013 because he was angry at watching the government lie repeatedly to the American people, including before Congress.

As a result, Congress  rushed in to protect… the phone companies, killing our first lawsuit. Later, after Snowden’s revelations, lawmakers passed some reforms to some of the programs we had sought to stop, but not nearly enough. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the government’s argument that – even though the whole world knew about the NSA spying and that it relied on access to information collected and handled by  major telephone companies – identifying which company participated would violate the state secrets privilege. But we had dramatically shifted how the government did mass spying: ending two of the three programs we had sued over, scaling back the third, and providing far more public information  about what the government was doing. In writing my book, I wanted to tell the truth about the progress we made without sugarcoating that we had not succeeded at nearly the scale that we did in the cryptography fights.

The third set of cases had a similar trajectory – an early win in the courts and some reform in Congress but ultimately not enough. These were the “Alphabet Cases” – so named because we couldn’t even name our clients publicly, assigning the cases letters instead – that we brought from 2011 through 2022 to scale back a kind of governmental subpoena called National Security Letters (NSLs), which let the FBI require companies to provide metadata about their customers but gagged them from ever telling anyone what had happened.

Though an appellate court ultimately sided with the government, we did succeed in helping our clients participate in the public debate and use their own experiences as evidence to counter the government’s misleading assertions. We had increased the procedural protections for those receiving NSLs, including clearing the way to challenge them with standards that were not quite as stacked against them. And we had helped create a path for corporate transparency reports that at least gave some information to the public about how often these controversial tools were being used. 

I wanted this book to bring readers with me into the actual work, the bumpy ride, the incremental progress of protecting privacy, especially in the courts, in hope that people will think about how they too can join the fight. What we worried about in the 1990s, and fought to prevent in the 2000s and 2010s, seems closer than ever: that surveillance becomes the handmaiden of authoritarianism. But even in our troubled times, I’m confident that we are not powerless and we can prevail if we are patient, smart, thoughtful and work together.  The Big Idea is that privacy is not just a  coat of anonymity that you throw on before doing something embarrassing –  it’s a check against unbridled government power. And as it turns out,  the actual work of protecting that privacy can make for a fun, exciting and surprising life.

Privacy’s Defender: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/12/the-big-idea-cindy-cohn/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59775