Mar 12th 2026
TWiT+ Club Shows 739
Privacy's Defender
EFF's Cindy Cohn on 30 Years of Digital Surveillance Battles
Leo Laporte sits down with Cindy Cohn, outgoing executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to discuss her new book "Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance." Cindy walks through three landmark legal battles that shaped the modern internet — freeing encryption from U.S. munitions law, exposing the NSA's secret Room 641A wiretapping operation inside AT&T, and challenging the FBI's gag-order-laden National Security Letters. They also dig into the headlines of right now: DOGE's reported access to Social Security records, IRS data used for immigration enforcement, and facial recognition deployed against protesters. As Cindy puts it, "we used to be talking about a scary future where the ability to marshal data against us was something that could happen — and now more and more people are seeing that we're actually living in a lot of that future." But she makes the case that the fight is still winnable.
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