Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People How Privacy’s Defender Cindy Cohn Changed the Future of Encryption
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Mar 11, 2026 Cindy Cohn, longtime leader at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and civil liberties lawyer, recounts landmark fights for encryption and digital rights. She discusses code as speech, how freeing encryption enabled modern secure tools, limits of mass surveillance, risks of metadata and facial recognition, Signal’s protections and practical limits, and the legal battles ahead around AI and national security.
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How EFF Began With Secret Service Raids
- EFF was founded after Secret Service raids on early online communities and companies like Steve Jackson Games threatened users and small businesses.
- John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and early funders like Steve Wozniak created EFF to defend user rights in the nascent internet.
Code Is Speech Freed Encryption For Everyone
- Bernstein v. Department of Justice established that publishing cryptographic code is speech and helped free encryption from export controls.
- Cindy argued code-as-science: code is a precise form of publication and the First Amendment protects its dissemination, which pressured the government to back down.
Winning Encryption Was Just The Start
- Winning encryption export freedom was critical but became a persistent defense because governments and agencies continually try to weaken encryption.
- Cindy spent decades defending that win against regulatory and backdoor attacks like NSA efforts.
