Electronic Frontier Foundation head right at home in SF

Cindy Cohn, an attorney who is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a digital-rights nonprofit based in San Francisco — said she sees her work fighting heavy-handed and intrusive government surveillance and defending technology users’ privacy, free speech and ability to innovate as fundamentally intertwined with principles that are at the core of U.S. democracy.

“Free speech is a cornerstone,” Cohn said, citing the practice of casting anonymous election ballots as an example. “Privacy is a cornerstone right. Privacy goes hand-in-hand with a democratic, self-governing system.”

Whether challenging restrictive federal rules equating cryptography with munitions, mass telecommunications spying by the National Security Agency, search-and-seizures of electronic materials or the use of surveillance technologies by the San Francisco Police Department, Cohn’s organization has long been at the center of civil-liberties controversies involving technology.

“Almost all the fights about rights and freedoms and democracy have a technical, have a digital element right now,” Cohn said.

Currently based in the Tenderloin, EFF was founded in 1990 before the mass adoption of web-browsing technology and the spectacular growth of the internet later in the decade.

The nonprofit today has about 125 employees, with the largest chunk being lawyers who engage in litigation and advocacy, Cohn said. There is also a “robust” technology team that, among other things, created a free web-browser extension called “Privacy Badger” that blocks advertisers and others from tracking users’ online activity.

“One of the things that we try really hard to be is right on the technology,” Cohn said.

In addition, there is an “activism team” to help people “make their voices heard,” Cohn said. In February, for example, EFF and Repro Uncensored announced a campaign to document and advocate against what they said appeared to be increased censorship by social-media companies of information about reproductive health and abortion.

Cohn started working in 1993 as outside lead attorney on a landmark case in which the organization represented Daniel Bernstein, a UC Berkeley graduate student who sued the federal government challenging restrictions on cryptography that required him to get a license, submit his ideas for review and register as an arms dealer.

Cohn said she knew one of EFF’s founders socially, and he asked her to join the case. Though “not particularly technical,” Cohn said she thought it would be important to help set up protections for people’s rights in an increasingly digital world.

Cohn was an English major who did her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics before graduating from the University of Michigan Law School. Before starting private practice, she said, her pursuits included working for a year at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights in Geneva.

“And so I really did just fall into it, and I had a lot of support along the way to learn — how the technology worked, how the Internet worked,” she said.

The Bernstein case is credited with helping prompt the relaxation of U.S. encryption restrictions and establishing that computer code can be a form of expression protected under the First Amendment.

Encryption today is a ubiquitous tool enabling the security of a multitude of different types of online communications and other transactions, Cohn said, although she said EFF is still defending against government attempts to weaken encryption protections.

Cohn said she grew up in a small Iowa town that was “great place to be a little kid” but where — being from one of the only Jewish families — she came to feel “like a bit of a misfit.” One reason Cohn loves San Francisco is that it is a place that welcomes diversity, she said.

“I kind of joke that San Francisco is the island of misfit toys,” she said. “A lot of people come here because they don't quite fit in where they come from and we ... find commonality, not because we're alike, but because we all celebrate our differences.”

Cohn, who is a host of EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast, is now in the final stages of producing a memoir called “Privacy’s Defender” that is scheduled to be published next spring by MIT Press. In the book, Cohn said, she chronicles her career, with highlights including the cryptography case and two other key subjects of legal controversy.

Cohn seeks to show how the right to digital privacy is central to other rights, including the ability to organize and make change in the world, according to a publisher’s note previewing the tome.

One of the book’s featured cases, Cohn said, involves whistleblower Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who came to EFF in 2006 with evidence that the National Security Agency was engaged in mass spying on the telecommunications of millions of people from a facility in San Francisco.

In 2008, Congress subsequently passed a law that President George W. Bush signed providing retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with government surveillance after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Lawsuits against the NSA and AT&T and other telecom providers, for which EFF and others advocated, were ultimately dismissed, but EFF has continued pushing for federal legislative reforms concerning such surveillance.

Another focus of the book is the use of national-security letters by federal officials to obtain the telecommunications and financial records of U.S. citizens without prior approval from courts. With such letters, federal officials have imposed permanent gag orders to prevent recipients from disclosing or criticizing the use of the letters publicly, Cohn said.

Credo Mobile was one company that fought back. With EFF as its counsel, it succeeded in getting a court to rule that the FBI did not show justification for imposing a gag order in its case. That ruling came in 2016, about six years after the company received a national security letter,

After decades of such battles, Cohn says the current moment is among the most worrisome she has confronted, largely because of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration.

“The authoritarian moves that we're seeing by the Trump administration right now put this at one of the most risky times for people who believe in democracy and freedom and justice and rule of law,” Cohn said. “The kind of threats we're seeing and the kinds of values that are being challenged now are really at a different and more frightening level than they have been in the past.”

EFF is one of several organizations representing current and former federal government employees and their unions that are suing the federal government over alleged privacy violations arising from the Office of Personnel Management granting Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency access to its systems, which contain personal records related to tens of millions of people.

A federal judge in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in early June against the government, finding that “no credible need” had been demonstrated to warrant such access and that Office of Personnel Management “violated the law and bypassed its established cybersecurity practices.”

“This was a breach of law and of trust,” wrote Judge Denise Cote.

EFF has also joined multiple amicus briefs opposing Trump’s penalizing of law firms that employed people or represented clients or causes he doesn’t like, calling those actions unconstitutional.

“We think attacks against law firms really ... run the risk of undermining ... the central thing that we do as an organization, which is use the courts to stand up for people's rights, often with support from pro bono lawyers,” Cohn said. “Lawyers need to be able to take on causes that the government disagrees with without fear.”

Meanwhile, EFF has advocated locally against the expanded use of surveillance technology by the San Francisco Police Department. EFF opposed Proposition E, which city voters approved in March 2024 to authorize, among other things, police use of drones.

“We don't think surveillance makes us safer,” Cohn said.

Cohn expressed displeasure with the millions of dollars that cryptocurrency tycoon Chris Larsen and his company Ripple Labs donated to The City for setting up a new downtown police Real-Time Investigation Center to include the use of drones and other surveillance technologies, something Mayor Daniel Lurie touted in June.

“That's the kind of stuff that we oppose,” Cohn said. “We're not crypto billionaires, so it's harder for us to get attention for it ...”

EFF is not going anywhere, however, Cohn said.

“We're here, we're stronger than ever,” she said. “We've won a lot of things in the past, and we're going to continue to stand up through these times.”