KQED's Forum Fighting for Internet Privacy in an Increasingly Surveilled World
Mar 19, 2026
Cindy Cohn, longtime Electronic Frontier Foundation leader and author on digital rights and privacy. She recounts early EFF battles over encryption and AT&T wiretapping. She discusses commercial tracking, license-plate readers, spyware in domestic abuse, and how AI magnifies mass surveillance. She explains why privacy is a check on power and outlines strategies for surveillance self-defense.
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The Trench Coat Tip That Proved Wiretapping
- Mark Klein, an AT&T technician, brought schematics and showed EFF a bank of fiber-optic splitters sending a duplicate stream into a secret room 641A.
- That physical evidence enabled EFF's litigation about mass domestic surveillance stemming from backbone interception.
Ads Don't Need To Listen To Be Creepy Accurate
- Real-time audio eavesdropping by phones is unlikely and unnecessary for ad targeting because metadata and existing content scans give advertisers strong predictive power.
- Companies scan email/content and use metadata to guess interests, so they can target uncanny ads without live listening.
Government And Commercial Surveillance Are Converging
- EFF initially focused on government surveillance because constitutional law fits public‑rights litigation, but commercial surveillance rose in the 2000s and required new expertise.
- Today government buying commercial data creates a direct pipeline between private tracking and state power.
