Privacy's Defenders: Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries

Cindy Cohn (0:02)

This is Privacy's Defenders, a podcast about the people who have fought to secure your digital privacy since 1990, long before most people even knew about the Internet. I'm Cindy Cohn. I had the honor of working to protect your privacy for 26 of those years, serving as the executive director and before that, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF has led some of the biggest privacy cases of our time. We fought for encryption in the early Internet days, and post-911, we stood up against the NSA's illegal mass surveillance campaigns, among many, many other cases.

Over the next five episodes, you'll meet some of the people who are involved in those fights. The lawyers.

Cooper Quinton (0:51)

We have someone at the front door who says he's an AT&T technician who can tell us how this thing is wired.

Cindy Cohn (0:59)

The journalists.

SPEAKER_3 (1:01)

You had the government arguing that they couldn't confirm or deny anything because everything is protected by state secrets, right?

Cindy Cohn (1:08)

The people whose lives were caught up in those battles.

SPEAKER_4 (1:11)

Holy cow, they're spying on me.

Cindy Cohn (1:14)

And the hackers and cypher punks who understood long before the rest of us that privacy would become one of the defining civil liberties of the digital age. Together, these stories reveal how the technologies we all rely on today stand on the shoulders of those who fought to preserve our privacy and are still fighting to do so today.

I think about privacy a little different than most people do. People think about privacy and they think about the Harry Potter cloak of invisibility that they throw over their head before they're about to do something kind of uglier that they don't want seen. That's definitely a piece of privacy, but it's not why it's important. To me, privacy is important because it gives people with less power a zone of safety from people who have more power. That's why I think it's important, and that's why I've spent my career defending it.

For this first episode, I'm going to tell you a story about how EFF got started by an unlikely trio of a cowboy, an early tech titan, and a cypherpunk. Now, if you don't know what that last term is, stick around, and I'll tell you later. But first, you should know that this story is not just about history or nostalgia. It's about understanding how we got into today's situation, where our civil liberties are eroding to the point that our democracy is in question. And it's also about what we can do to change that.

Cooper Quinton (2:48)

Thank you very much. Hi, everybody. How are y'all doing today?

The title on the program is How Hackers Can Defrost Democracy. The actual title of this talk is ICE vs. the Hackers.

Cindy Cohn (2:58)

That's Cooper Quinton at the B-Side Cybersecurity Conference in San Francisco.

Cooper Quinton (3:03)

I think that it's pretty safe to say that fascism has come to the US now, and you need to think about what risks you're willing to take and not become paralyzed by surveillance and paralyzed by fear because that's how ICE wins.

Cindy Cohn (3:17)

Cooper is a Senior Technologist at EFF, and part of his job is to teach people how to keep their personal data private. That's especially important now as mass surveillance tools and technologies blanket the nation.

Cooper Quinton (3:31)

They're going on a surveillance shopping spree. ICE has been spending millions of dollars on new surveillance tech.

Cindy Cohn (3:39)

Standing in front of an enormous IMAX screen and wearing a t-shirt that says Defend Encryption, Cooper points out the tools that ICE is using to spy on people.

Cooper Quinton (3:48)

These are forensic extraction devices. Basically what ICE agents do is plug your phone into this and if they can get it unlocked or if this device can help them unlock it, it'll make a copy of all the data on your phone. All of your signal messages, all of your pictures, all of your location history, your contacts, everything.

Cindy Cohn (4:08)

Whether we accept it or not, we are living through a mass surveillance effort by our own government. And it's limiting our ability to say what we want, where we want.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. I've been working to protect digital privacy for decades and what I've learned is that privacy isn't about secrecy, it's about power. Who has it and who has the ability to protect themselves from it?

I first started to understand privacy this way in 1990

I just moved to San Francisco and I'd found a room in a flat in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and I had a brand new roommate and we decided to throw a party. We'd set up the best stereo we could find, putting together pieces of her stereo and my stereo, and we just kept turning the music up and up and up. Everybody who came just seemed to want to dance and it was just one of those nights that felt a little off the hook. About midway through the party when the music was loud, a posse of guys showed up and they stumbled into the living room where everyone was dancing and immediately started joining in. They were dressed in tie-dye, some had long stringy hair, and a few of them were clearly into the Grateful Dead like me. I sat down and started talking to some of them and it turned out that they were a bunch of hackers. These were guys who were already living in the Internet that the rest of us would soon experience. They were working in a network where everybody could communicate with everybody else seamlessly and for free over digital technologies. And I thought that was kind of amazing. It's so hard now in retrospect to realize how revolutionary that felt at the time. One of those guys, John Gilmore, had been thinking about how the Constitution was going to apply to people's rights once everybody started being online. That was immediately what I started thinking about, because I'd just come out of doing human rights work in Geneva, and it was that impetus that led him to be one of the people who started the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose job it was to stand up for users in this new digital world. It just was happenstance that he showed up in my house. So now here we are 36 years later, and the organization that John founded is larger than it's ever been before, and it is still working to stand up for hackers and other users who are active online.