Privacy’s Defender: Fight Against Digital Surveillance with Cindy Cohn

Privacy’s Defender

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Executive Director Cindy Cohn’s Journey Inside the Privacy Battles That Shaped Today’s Internet

Cindy Cohn has devoted her life to the fight for digital rights. She’s tangled with federal officials to keep our online conversations secure from the government’s prying eyes, fought to ensure that you are told when your information has been turned over to the government, and argued before judges to protect our right to speak and to share science and knowledge on the internet.

In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), Cindy weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.

During this national book tour, Cindy will be at UC Santa Cruz to give a book talk on May 19, 2026.

Free and open to the public with registration.

Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. Before becoming Executive Director a decade ago, Cindy was the organization’s Legal Director from 2000-2015, and led the organization’s impact litigation work on bringing balance to copyright law, stopping mass spying and protecting freedom of expression online. She’s won many awards for her work and even more court decisions.

UCSC co-sponsors:

Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, and The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS)