The fight for privacy and free speech in the surveillance age

The early internet opened unprecedented avenues for
speech, creativity, and connection without traditional
gatekeepers.

But it also raised civil liberties questions: Do our
offline freedoms exist online? And if so, how far do they
extend?

Today, those questions are more urgent than ever.
Advances in AI have given governments powerful new tools to track,
monitor, and analyze our behavior, raising fundamental concerns
about the future of free expression in the digital age.

Today we are joined by Cindy Cohn, the executive
director for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. She has spent thirty years as a civil liberties
attorney specializing in digital rights, which she documents in her
newly published memoir Privacy’s
Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital
Surveillance.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

05:17 Why write this book now?

09:11 Does privacy make free speech possible?

14:52 Code as speech: Bernstein v. United States

33:34 The Patriot Act and government spying

51:09 National security letters and Section 702

57:57 Who is Tony Coppolino?

01:06:06 Why EFF left X

01:11:05 What’s next for Cindy

01:13:56 Outro

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