Future Goals and Final Thoughts

Hey there, it's Cindy Cohen, co-host of How to Fix the Internet, and the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here with a bonus episode for you. My conversation with best-selling novelist, journalist, and EFF special advisor, also my very good friend, Corey Doctorow. It's about my new book, Privacy's Defender, My 30-year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. Part memoir, part battle cry, part recruitment text, what I do in this book is I tell three stories from my perspective as a person who was standing up for your privacy over the past 30 years. The first part is the set of cases we did around the crypto wars, where we successfully freed up encryption from government control. The second set of stories are about the NSA's dragnet surveillance, how we helped uncover that surveillance and brought it to the attention of the courts, and the multi-year battle we fought to try to get the surveillance curtailed. And the th ird set of stories are about the fights that EFF undertook against the FBI's eternal gag orders in something called national security letters. Together, I hope these give you a rich history of what it's really like to stand up and protect privacy and a view of it that helps inspire you to think about what you could do. My conversation with Corey was recorded on March 10th in front of a packed house at San Francisco's iconic City Lights bookstore. Big shout out for City Lights for recording it and for hosting me on the day that my book launched. It was just a thrill to be in the House of Lawrence Villangetti to talk about my book. Now, I hope you'll enjoy listening to the conversation with Corey. And if you're interested in learning more about my book, you can find links and information about it at EFF.org slash privaciesdefender. And you'll also find links there to the various places I'm going on my little book tour that starts soon. So EFF.org slash privaciesdefender, and you can find out about the bookstore and where you can give access to the book. It's also available pretty much everywhere books are sold or lent. And finally, stay tuned to this feed. We're working on a special podcast for you that not only goes into depth about the stories I tell in the book, but it gives other people's perspective on those early days and those big fights to give us back the privacy that we all deserve. I can't wait to share it with you. My name is Peter Maravallis. I'm the events director here at City Lights, and for those of you online, thank you for joining us as well. And as always, we are beaming to you from the unceded ancestral homeland of the Rematishalone people. It is always a pleasure and an honor to do so. So it is always fabulous to have Electronic Frontier Foundation in the house. They are the co-sponsor of tonight's event, and of course, we are thrilled to have Cindy Cohen with us celeb rating her new book. It is called Privacy's Defender: My 30-year fight against digital surveillance. It is, of course, produced by our friends over at the MIT Press, and it chronicles Cindy's 30-year battle to protect our rights to digital privacy and shows us just how central this is to all of our rights and our ability to organize and make change in the world. This book arrives to us at a very important moment. Cindy is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2000 to 2015. She served as the EFF's legal director as well as the general counsel. Today she spearheads a team of more than 120 lawyers, activists, and technologists who are dedicated to ensuring that technology supports speech, privacy, and innovation for all. Joining her tonight in conversation is none other than Corey Doctorow, who is of course no stranger to many of you and to City Lights. Uh, you can learn more about his work at crabhound.com. Of course he's a fiction writer , activist, journalist. Um, most recent book is called Enchidification, and it can be found at the front counter. Uh, and also he's got a new book coming out in June. It's called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. So they're going to be in conversation tonight. We're going to have a QA at the end. Uh we ask that you raise your hand. There will also be a signing. Uh, I will have these handy-dandy post-its to hand to you, and we would like you to to write whom you would like the book inscribed. You may buy them at the front counter and then just kind of line up over on this side of the room. And there is also lots of VFF swag at the front counter. So please check that out. There's stickers, literature. So um without much more ado, welcome to City Lights to you both. I I just want to say what an honor it is to get to launch my book at City Lights. I mean this is just an iconic place. It was one of the first places I came when I moved to San Francisco. And I'm I'm just thrilled bey ond words that um we're we're able to do this here. It is. It's a fantastic bookstore. Thank you all for coming. Um I am a recovering bookseller myself, and and I always know when I when I do events at stores that uh even in a city like San Francisco, it is not automatic that you get great independent bookstores. We both have our books here. I have a child in college in the UC system. I would like it if my books sold, but you don't have to buy my books. You can buy a book because that's how this store stays open. And so I hope you will help support independent bookselling because it's um a very important part of our culture. Uh so the order of service tonight as you heard, Cindy and I are going to talk about her book for about 40 minutes. We're going to open it to questions and answers. A good question has one part, not two, and it's not more of a comment than a question. And then when we're done, because Cindy and I use the internet a lot, we've been able to order these devices from the internet that make books non-returnable. And we' re gonna be making uh demonstrations of them uh for you so you can just bring your books up and we'll show you if they work. So Cindy, you have written your first book and it's a memoir and uh the traditional opening question in one of these things is tell me about your book well um my book is um really a set of stories about the work that I've done on behalf of EFF trying to stand up for privacy. And it um there are three sets of stories in the book. The first one is about uh what people sometimes call the crypto wars, which was work that we did to free up encryption technology from government control in the 1990s. Um, it's also a bit of an alternative history of uh the early internet, because I I have to admit I got a little frustrated that all of the early histories of the early of the internet were about guys and the corporations and businesses that they started. And while that certainly happened in the nineties, I was getting grumpy about it. And I decided that since I was there too, I would try to tell a little richer history of of of those times because a lot more happened than just the founding of of a couple of companies. Um and the second set of stories are about uh the and the fight that EFF engaged in to try to stop the NSA from spying on MAS on the internet. Um, that features a couple of whistleblowers, one you may not have heard of, named Mark Klein, who you should have heard about by the time we're done, and another who you probably have heard about named Ed Snowden, who uh appeared uh to help us uh get standing in the case. Um and then the third set of cases are about uh what we call national security letters, which are a a form of subpoena, secret subpoena that gags the recipients, um, that became kind of a go-to tool for the FBI um after uh September eleventh and um gagged people forever from being able to say that they had received one. And so we we fought a long um set of cases to try to do that where our our clients remained a secret for over six years. So I I tell all of those stories, but I also kind of try to talk about what it will what it's like to spend your life um trying to stand up for privacy or anything and include some of the the lessons that I've learned about how to do this for the long run, as well as some of the kind of crazy personal things that happened along the way. And my my hope is that um it it can inspire some people to think that this is something that they could do as well um because these are long fights um and uh it's important that people are are stick with them and um and if you do, like really amazing things can happen in your life as well. There's there's an element of this uh memoir, and it's a very good book, I should say. I I I read it with a great deal of excitement and pleasure. And even having been in many of the events described, I found that um getting your perspective on them and the way that you wove that into your own personal story was very exciting. But there is an aspect of this memoir that shares some DNA with other early internet histories, which is to say it's a story about people building the airplane while they're flying it. Oh yeah. Right? You're you're you're you're inventing this new category of digital rights law, along with a cohort of of colleagues who are brilliant and inspired and doing cool things. And and you know, you just said, well, you're hoping that this inspires other people. Um I I'd love to hear you reflect on what it's like to to invent a a new kind of career that has a great deal of meaning, is very hard, has very high stakes, and and maybe you could reflect on what that means now as we're seeing the rule of law in decline and people are trying to figure out what they need to do to kind of uh you uh we were talking earlier, have a republic if you can keep it. Right. Yeah, I mean it it is the case and and this is something that, you know, EFF's 125 people now, and it's one of the things that I will say a lot, and many of you are are in my staff meetings weekly and you hear me say this, which is like we're just making this up as we go along, right? We're pushing, we're trying to figure out what works. We're certainly learning from the people who came before us. And I absolutely modeled the way EFF thinks about uh impact litigation on a lot of the work at our friends at the ACLU and other places. But really, we really did just make it up as we as we go along and tried to figure out what's the best way to go from here. And I think we're definitely in a time when we need that. I I I think that um we're in a time where the institutions that we relied on to get some of the relief that we got are are themselves under attack and we we may need to shift gears and try to spend some time really standing up for those institutions and helping rebuild them. Um, and and new tactics and strategies, right? EFF was the first organization to really, you know h,ire a staff technologist. Uh, Seth Schoen, who's here tonight, is was the first one who we hired um to have technologists kind of, you know, riding along with us and explaining to us how things worked and believing he's the most patient man in the world uh to explain to me um and all the other eff lawyers how the how the internet works. Um but kind of thinking about that like what are the tools we need to be able to go into this new space and really understand it and then translate that out so that judges and people who aren't deep in the tech can understand it well enough to make the right decisions. And I think we're in another time where we need to be innovative and creative around those kinds of things. Um I think one of the differences now is that some of the times when we would show up in the early 90s, like people didn't have any idea what we were talking about and there wasn't really anybody on the other side who under stood what we were talking about. Either I used to joke that I'm like, I'm I'm a lawyer from the future and I'm here to explain the internet to you. Now there is a really dedicated set of people who do not want the same future we are and they are advocating too. So we don't have the benefit of being kind of the only people from the future anymore. Um there are alternate futures and we need to stand up for the one that actually stands with users. Do you have a a theory about why EFF was able to kind of invent its organization so well over the years? I mean, it's not like we didn't have missteps and it's not like we didn't lose cases, but uh you know, as you say it's it's a hundred and twenty-five people. So when I met EFF, I was a carpet bagger who'd moved to San Francisco with a startup and EFF had just been evicted because people like me kept moving to San Francisco with the startup. And my startup had an extra office. So we moved EFF into the office, and then I quit working for my startup and started working for EFF. Sure . And but there were six EFFers at the time and now there's 125. So w what is it just that we caught the tailwind of the internet? Did we have something that did we have an insight or a set of principles or uh did we luck into an institutional structure? What was it that let EFF continue to be uh relevant and to have to s attract so many individual small money donors that let us be very independent and and have all those kind of structural advantages too. I mean, I think I think we did get I don't know if it's lucky, but like we we grew along with the internet, right? Um and we also diversified along with the internet. EFF does a you know, doesn't look like it looked when we were starting. We have a much wider range of people with a much wider range of perspectives because the internet requires that um now at a level that maybe, you know, it was kind of a little bit of a plaything of journalists and academics and things when we started. So I think we've grown and we've broadened along with the internet and the issues that we've taken on have broadened as well. I think that we have been really lucky in that you know EFF has 30,000 dues paying members and they stick with us. I think there is a way in which EFF is a an identity as well as a thing that you join. It's a way that you show that you understand about tech, you care about tech, and you also care about tech for good. The making, you know, people say tech for good now, and it's kind of become hack night, but but I think it's actually for the core people who supported us year after year they recognize that that that we need to have people there who are standing up for the users of the internet and in order to do that, we need them to be able to feel stable. Yeah, I always say information doesn't want to be free, but people do. Yes. Um so when we started, when you started with your privacy cases, maybe you could recap the the Bernstein case a little here. But when you start with your privacy cases, they were mostly about about uh government surveillance. Um subsequently we had some cases and campaigns around private surveillance. And then these days, as we're seeing with the Trump administration, there's not really a difference, right? The ad tech data that's collected to, you know, uh eke out a few basis points and conversion rates for serve for display ads is now being used to figure out who to round up an extraordinary rendition to a torture camp. So I I wonder if if you could um think about with the historic antecedents for this. Did we I think we understood this early on. I don't know that everyone else understood it. What is the relationship of state and and private surveillance? I mean it's always been the case and I'm happy to I'll I'll go back and talk about Bernstein because that is a little different. But certainly the NSA surveillance, the NSA didn't come to you guys, didn't come to people directly in order to get access to everybody 's information. They went to the phone companies and they went to the internet companies. It's always been the case that if you needed to do mass surveillance, you went to the companies. I think what we're seeing now, you know, I I I I I feel a little like Cassandra sometimes, right? That we've been seeing things coming that now are really able everybody's able to see, which is there the government is really able to weaponize the information that it has about us and they are the number one purchaser from data brokers as well. So they're able to to to take both the information that they've collected, say, you know, what you've given to the IRS and hand it to the ICE. Um, so inside the government, um handing information around, but also purchasing from the data broker world. Um so now they purchase from them. It used to be that they'd hand them mass subpoenas, but either way, the government has always been hungry for the information that private um that uh that the private companies gather about it. So I don 't think there ever was a big difference. People used to ask me, you know, are you more worried about the big tech companies or the government? And I would be like, you do not understand the problem if you think we have this choice, because we don't. Um now I think that's very readily apparent. Um and the the Trump administration has really taken um what used to be a little more subtle and hidden and made it not at all. And so um so I think it's always been the case. Um you know and and it they're they're both problems, right? I mean I think even if it was just consumer privacy, we're now living in a world on the consumer side where the price you pay for things is dependent can be increasingly dependent on all the other things that they know about you so that they price it at the maximum amount you will pay. And and the wager increasingly is that the whether you get a mortgage and you know uh and those kinds of things. So I think people are starting to feel how surveillance capitalism can be marshall ed against them as well. Um so even if it were just that, that would be a problem. But, you know, I've always I'm kind of a, you know, it's old school civil liberties are really about the government and um the government's ability to, you know, pull you off the street, take you away from your family, either deport you or put you in jail. And that matters too. They both matter. And I will never ever choose. They're both bad. And about Bernstein, could you just recap that? Sure. So the Bernstein case is how I got dragged into all of this. Um and um, you know, I moved to San Francisco, I started meeting um a bunch of people. I mean, literally they showed up at a party in my house, uh a bunch of people who were on the internet. And this is, you know, 1990. This is before the World Wide Web. And so these were were people, some of you are of this era, you know, typing in green letters on a black screen, but they were involved in the internet um before there was a worldwide web and and enjoy ing you know this idea of instantaneous communication with people all around the world. Um, and you know, at that time, you know, I remember counting my pennies so I could figure out when I lived in London how long I could talk to my mom for before it got bad, right? Before I couldn't afford it anymore. Um, having that erased was revolutionary at a level that I think it's hard for people to understand right now, but they were doing it and they were really living online. And I thought it was really cool. Um, and then one day, uh, one of those guys, a guy named John Gilmore, who's one of the founders of EFF, he called me up and he said, So we've got this guy, he's a math PhD student, and he wants to publish a computer program on the internet. And if he does, the government says he'll go to jail as an arms dealer? And I said, well, what does it do? Does it blow things up? And he said, no, it keeps things secret. And I said, well, that sounds like a first amendment problem to me. And he said, me too. Will you take the case? Um, and I was a baby lawyer at this time. I didn't know what I was do ing, but I went to my little law firm and I said, I think this internet thing's gonna be big um uh understatement of the year. And they let me take the case pro bono and we challenged the government's restrictions on this technology, which is called encryption, which turns out to be very central for both privacy and security online. Um, we challenged the government under a first amendment theory. For the legal geeks, it's the prior restraint part because it was a licensing scheme. And lo and behold, we won with this kind of ragtag team of lawyers um and a lot of crazy hackers who showed up at the hearing and and talked in public and organized and you know people were putting encryption on t-shirts and I think one guy actually got a tattoo and um kind of just demonstrating that like computer programs and computer code was a way of communicating to other people and it had to be the case that this was protected by the first amendment. And um, you know, this is one of the things that I uh you know I like about courts is that you know we were nobodies um but yet the judge Marilyn Hall Patel, not too far from here in federal district court, she read our briefs and she said, Lo and behold, these people are right, and we won against the national security infrastructure of the United States. And And um um and so it's because of that case and a lot of lobbying and a lot of other people I I I got to stand in the front in front of the judges, but I was by no means alone in this. Um my friend Brian Bellendorf's back there, he wrote a declaration for us back in the day. Um and uh we were able succeed in the district court, succeed in the ninth circuit and ultimately the government backed down and reduced the controls on the encryption. And you know, we don't have enough security on the internet right now, but a huge chunk of the security we do have is because we were able to free up encryption. And if you use Signal, you use encryption. If you go to your bank's website and it actually goes to your bank and not somebody else pretending to be your bank, that's because of encryption happening on the back end through a group called Let's Encrypt uh that EFF helped um sponsor. So both the stuff that you know you're using and the stuff that's below below what you you you can see encryption is how we have basic security and privacy online. And it's because of that fight that was presented to me to do, and I was very honored to do it, but it's because of the kind of some of these early hacker types who saw that we weren't gonna be able to have a private conversation online. We weren't gonna be able to have a hope of a private conversation online unless we could free up this this technology. I want to say one other use for encryption that I always mention here is when you get an update that for the software in your pacemaker, you're also relying on encryption to make sure that it's the right software. Yes. Lots of ways in which you're using encryption. Your anti-lock break system, the electronic lock in your home, all all of those things also you you're relying on encryption for the integrity of that software. So a a recurring theme in the book and tonight is the role of narrative, where you talked about Seth explaining things. Um you talked about explaining things to the judge in the book. Um and and narrative i it's uh uh you know the it you you're you're telling good stories in the book. You you've woven in a narrative of your own life and you're uh growing up adopted and growing up in the Midwest and all these other things. But um there's uh narrative is just it doesn't always work or uh there are lots of different kinds of narrative. And I think the Bernstein case really illustrates something interesting for me about what a lawyer brings to the table. And this because prior to the legal argument about the First Amendment, there were lots of arguments about encry ption in the halls of power, right? There were arguments like um we don't think that uh the encryption that the US government wants to um allow civilians to use is strong enough, and we think that bad guys will be able to break it. And sort of in the halls of power it's like, well, yes, but the NSA has hired a large plurality of every PhD mathematician from the Big Ten and the Ivies. Um and they say you're wrong. So I think you're wrong. And then we tried to prove it and and John is back there. John I just saw built a computer called D. That's the guy who called me. And I'm sorry about that. So all of the possible combinations of this encryption system in like two and a half hours. It was like a quarter million dollar computer currently sitting under my desk at home because John was tired of having it in his garage at the Hay. Uh and and it's a it's a beautiful machine. And and it was an incredible demonstration, right? The fact that for a quarter million dollars, one guy could expose the secrets of uh every American business and individual and the state itself. But again, that didn't move the needle. And what ended up moving the needle was what I think to a lot of people sounded like and maybe even still sounds like a weird argument, which is that the first amendment it protects computer code, and yet you had that insight and you were able to explain it. So could you talk about the different kinds of narratives that we use when we try to advance uh policy questions and and when which ones work when? Oh boy, that's hard because it really is very context dependent. I mean, I will say that the code of speech I argument is one of the things that came to me that we then helped develop out and contextualize. Um, you know, it it it came from really listening to people who were on the internet, especially people who were doing encryption code, but people more generally, like we, you know, we had um, you know, Hal Abelson, who is a very storied professor at MIT, taught the intro to computer science class there. And Hal also a very pati ent man sat and talked with me about like why code he said code is is primarily for people to speak to each other. It's only secondarily for computers, right? Like this frame was how people were working on the internet and the development of the science. And you know, people think about the First Amendment, about political speech or about art, but the development of science is one of the core pieces of of the first amendment. It's why freedom of expression, one of the reasons why freedom of expression is really, really important. And so it just became clear to me in talking to all of these people what they were doing and how it fit into the frame of the law. And so that's the story that we we put together. And it started with Dan, right? He was a computer science PhD student who wanted to publish his ideas on the internet so other people could look at them, think about them, talk about them, and comment on them. I me an, that's just what the first amendment is. So I think that um for me anyway, in all of the narratives of the cases in the mass spying cases talking about um how you know the founders of this country didn't like general warrants. They didn't like the idea that the that that um the police could just show up, you know, could get a warrant based on the fact that somebody wasn't paying their taxes and then use that warrant to search whoever they wanted, right? That's the the history of the fourth amendment. Well, what's going on when the NSA is tapping into the internet? They're looking at everything first and figuring out what they want to investigate second. So I think in all of these situations, you have to kind of really take the time to look at what's going on and then how does it relate to the values that are embedded in the law and then make that argument. So I think one of the things that narrative does that's very important is it connects what seemed to be disparate phenomena over time uh and makes a coherent narrative out of them, a co herent story out of them. And and you've just done this, right? You've talked about the framers and general warrants and then the fourth amendment. Um, I I think that you know, we have an unfortunate tendency as a society to lack object permanence and to to to be like toddlers who still think peekaboo is cool and and to just wake up one day and say Trump has no antecedents. How did we end up in a situation where authoritarians are using the threat of an enemy within to sideline the Bill of Rights and using technology to do it and arguing that technology gives us a unique way to head off existential threats to society. I joined EFF months after 9-11. To me, I I I feel like uh I was here once before. Could you talk about maybe the historic antecedents to this moment uh in the Patriot Act and in other fights that we had in the in the aughts and and how you know this is just sort of the the son and grandson of those fights? Yeah, I I've been saying, you know, this is all Dick Cheney's fault. Um uh or maybe David Addington. Um I think that, you know, one of the things that happened, I mean honestly, the the in my lifetime, the first time the government got caught spying on people was in the Nixon administration, right? Where they literally broke into a building to to spy on um on people. Um and but also did a whole lot of other things. And Senator then named Frank Church did a whole investigation, discovered mass spying by the government, like, you know, swooping up people's telegrams as they came into the United States. And we got the very first law that began to put some law around this national security stuff. It was called FISA. Wasn't a great law. It's still not a great law, but it was better than what happened before, um, which was no law. And then, you know, September 11th happened and they passed the Patriot Act and they tore down a lot of the protections or changed them or kind of defined them out of things. And then we've been on that we were on the slow path back again. And we created a bunch of national security sized holes in the legal fabric. You know, our country was founded in a revolution. Like if national security was an exception to the Constitution, we wouldn't have had one at the beginning. So I don't think it makes a lot of sense. And I think there's a reason why we don't have a national security exception to our constitution, at least in the one that we can all read. But we created de facto one and um and now what we're seeing and no uh you know uh now what we're seeing is we saw bits and pieces and push and pushes through it and things that were problematic which we've been fighting for a long time I think what what what's happened with the Trump administration is they've looked at all these holes and they're just driving a truck through all of them. So it's it's much more visible. It's it's much less subtle. Um and um and and and and in some ways it is bigger. I mean it it it's it's much bigger. Um um the refusal to follow court orders and a lot of the other things are not things that we we really saw at the same level before. So I don't want to say this, you know, 'twas ever so, but it's definitely the case that there were holes. This is again why I kind of ended up feeling like Cassandra, because we were saying for a long time, you know, we're setting up the conditions that could turn into something that is authoritarian. Um Ed Snowden called it turnkey totalitarianism, um, trying to trying to talk about this same this moment. And I think there's a ways in which now we're we're in it. And so we we have to fix these if we're gonna go forward as a republic. So uh the um I'm sorry I just lost my thread point uh I think I lost it in answering your question Say so the EFF of bread and butter are technologists who care about the human factors, the human rights, um, human thriving. Uh, and and often today with the the caricature of the technologist is the tech bro, who sees technology as a way to wield power over other people, as opposed to a way to uplift other people by showing them how to use these tools that make their lives better and so on. And um I I feel like our milieu and I think many of the people in this room are technologists who discovered with digital tools and digital networks something about themselves that was otherwise not available to them in the milieu that they were born in, and the in the town that they grew up in, and the family they grew up in, and the context they grew up in. And yet digital tools show them the words to describe who they could be, the ideas that that could describe their worldview. Many people came here to this city to to to meet up with one another and to kind of foment a kind of counterculture around technology. And there's a parallel here in your own story. So one of the things you talk about at a great length in the book and in a way that's very revealing and moving is what it's like growing up adop ted and your the circumstances of your adoption, the encounters you had with your birth family, some of which were quite wrenching. Uh and uh one of the things that's very clear is that you grew up feeling a little bit like a fish out of water, uh partly because you were just a smart person who cared a bunch of about a bunch of stuff that wasn't necessarily par for the course in a small town in Iowa, but also because of this this ch this circumstance of birth. And I see a parallel in your own life, right? That you that that the digital world opened up a set of possibilities for you that you didn't suspect, but you immediately recognize as the possibilities that you were made to seize. And the reason that technology has been better than it than it could have been, the reason technology has stayed as good as it did for as long as it did, is because so many tech workers within these companies, they're kind of tron-pilled. They wanted to fight for the user, you know? And uh and I and I wondered if you could just reflect on like this kind of technologist that is not seen really in our discourse, even though we know that those people are out there and they seem so important to us. And what now it's just become a cliche of someone says, Well, I want to do technology, you said it yourself, technology for good. I want to help other people with technology. It's just like well, you've come up with a way to talk about how you getting rich is going to make other people better off. But you you're insincere in at some foundational level. Yeah, I mean it was a whole you know sil the whole Silicon Valley TV show was based on this idea that it was phony. And the thing that is is really hard for me, and uh, you know, Mitch Kapor's here is one of the founders of EFF. I know plenty of people who this is not true for, um, and they don't get the spotlight at the level that the people who it's true for. I mean, i again, I think that um but I I think you're right that there is something to the fact that technology, the the the internet especially kind of and and it it it fit in San Francisco in some ways. I call San Francisco the island of misfit toys, right? It's a place where people who didn't fit in where they came from could always come and kind of try and find community. Of course that's true for the gay community traditionally, but it's not the only one. And I think that a lot of people who um found community in the digital world were people who didn't where they came from. And so it it pulled from the same thing. And I I I always felt a little like I didn't fit in where I came from, my brothers here tonight, my rock. Um but you know we we were not like the rest of people uh in our little hometown. And so coming to San Francisco, by the way, I followed him here, um, is was was a way to kind of try to find a place where you could fit in where being, you know, a little off was celebrated uh and and um and you know the the home of the weird i i love that about uh we have little stickers at eff that says keep eff weird um i know we stole it from austin but still um but i think that there is something about that early, especially early technologists people that where they they found community in, you know, and were able to be a lifeline for people who didn't. It's one of the reasons I'm gonna branch to now it's one of the reasons why we think age gating and a lot of the things that are that are getting passed right now um which are gonna act as barriers for kids who don't fit in having access to the digital world um because you're going to be subject to whether your parents think you should or not. And that's not always the people who are supporting you. Um not all the kids have the the the parents who are supportive and the so many kids. We did a little informal, completely unscientific survey at EFF of kids asking them how important the internet was to them. And the stories were heart-wrenching. Like I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for my online community. Like my family doesn't get me. I'm I grew up in a religion that doesn't get me. And it's the online community that saved me. And so part of why we're so passionate about a lot of the things that are being done right now to try to gate the internet is because we worry about that next generation of kids and whether they're gonna be able to have access to it. So yeah, I think the internet was the home of the weird in some really good ways and now all the oxygen's been sucked out of the room by people who I I actually think are deeply weird, but not in the same way. And not and not in a good way for all the rest of us. Yeah. You used to say to uh media companies when they were doing uh during the Napster Wars when they were arguing for very ready censorship of the internet with uh very low evidentiary bar, kind of censor first, ask questions later. And these are obviously companies that had litigated some of the most important First Amendment cases in American jurisprudence. And I remember used to say, I know you love the First Amendment, I just wish you'd share. Yeah, absolutely. And uh and and I think that there's also there's a there there's a lot of weirdos out there on the internet who want their kind of weirdness to thrive, but no one else's kind of weirdness to have a home. Yeah, and I think we're seeing that now. And it's really sad, right? A lot of people who who said that they really cared about the first amendment and freedom of speech who are now in power massively censoring other people. Um and um, you know, I think some of us could see that coming. Um, but it it's really it's really obvious, right? That some of these things are are things are are values that people hold deep in their heart. And you can say those actually those same values and not stand up for them. Just really use them as a vehicle to get yourself power. And we're seeing that, you know, uh really um tremendously in the area of free speech right now and in the area of privacy. So I I before to questions, I wanna um follow up on that and uh ask you about this this change in the kind of valence of free speech that has happened over the last five or six years, where b both privacy and free speech have acquired a kind of reactionary odor where they're they're view they're sort of coded as belonging to reactionary movements and and xenophobic movements. Uh and um I I I wonder what we do first of all to to take back those values and what we say to people who have been kind of um you know uh, uh not particularly engaged spectators of this fight who absorb it kind of in an ambient way and have just gone, oh I guess that stuff was just bullshit all along. I don't blame people for this. There are a lot of subjects in the world that I follow as a spectator at a distance and just sort of vaguely understand based on what people I think uh are generally right, believe about it because life's too god damn short to be an expert on all of it. But it I I fear for it. I fear for the fact that the standard barriers for free speech are such bad actors. And I fear for the fact that the people who should be the standard bearers for free speech are often suspicious of it today. Well, I I mean, I may be being a little Pollyanna here, um, but it's kind of a dark Pollyanna. I think that story is changing. I think that right now with the amount of repression we're seeing by the government, we're seeing a lot of people who recognize how important free speech is and and and truly free speech, right? Not just I I have the right to be an asshole to other people online, but actually we need to share information about this protest. We need to help people understand that there's a better way. And I I I I hope anyway that that suspicion is falling away as people are starting to see the free speech really be under attack, journalists being arrested, people filming the police , which is your right under the First Amendment to film and observe the police. It's heartbreaking and not not that you know that the both of the people who were killed in Minnesota were engaged in their First Amendment right to observe and film the police. I think people are starting to see that. I think they're starting to see why the First Amendment is important for people who don't have power. Um, and it's one of the tools for people who don't have power to protect themselves and to also share. I think of privacy in exactly the same way. I think privacy is a shield for the power, the less powerful against the more powerful. Um, and I think we're living in times where people are seeing that. Like the communities that I'm involved in that are organizing are organizing on signal, right? Because they recognize that it's important to have a zone of privacy to organize, even if you're ultimately going to be in a public protest and you're going to be in a place that's that's public, you need to have a private con versation to be able to do that. And I I would submit that every um positive social movement that we've had in my lifetime, while it had a very public voice, um, had to start with a private conversation. And um protecting those is one of the of the steps. So I I don't know how to convince people other than to try to say look around like this is the the the people who need these rights are are more and more obvious as we're living in a deeper and deeper time where the governmental forces and the corporate forces are trying to take it away from you. I guess you could do the flip side, which is what's the first thing that happens when a despot gets power? They try to take away people's privacy and free speech. We're seeing that as well. So it may be that you can just define it by what the bad guys are doing. Yeah, I I I never think that if we built good enough encryption, we could build a little airtight bubble where we wouldn't need the rule of law. Uh or or uh but but you know it's we we all know about rubber hose crypt analysis when someone ties you to a chair and hits you with a rubber hose until you divulge your passphrase, it doesn't matter how many bits there are in the in the key if if there isn't anything to stop someone from hitting you with a rubber hose. It's a piece of it, but yet, you know, uh talk to Mr. Snowden, right? We found out about the truth about a lot of what our government was doing, in part because he and Laura Poitras uh were use PGP. We're able to encrypt their conversations with each other. That private conversation is what helped all the rest of us learn the public part. And that's what encryption is for. Encryption is to have a temporary zone in which you can organize to make sure no one hits you with a rubber hose. But it's not a substitute for a system of the rule of law in which uh rubber hoses are off the table. No, no. It has to be it's a piece of it. And it doesn't even give you security all by yourself, right? You need, you know, security is a team sport. You need to have the people you're talking to not turn on you. And there's all the technology in the world won't help if that doesn't happen. So it's not, you know, it's a necessary but not sufficient. I don't know. Um it's a it's a piece of the story. It's an important piece of the story, but it's by no means the whole story. Once again, where we get to questions, mind you, one part not too, never more of a comment than a question. Uh who would like to ask Cindy a question? There's something online. Oh, someone online. Go ahead. What are we gonna do about California Digital Assurance Act? My husband And Patrick is very worried and C is worried in a different way. And so perhap s camera that does not admit of him holding a phone at the same time. So it's good. But Corey is his defense attorney. Um so uh V California has signed a very bad age verification law and um it is uh I mean the governor says it's gonna be amended. I don't know, but I think we really do need to stand up for it. It's not only bad because it's a bad age verification law, but it reaches all the way into the operating system, which means it's a pretty big threat to the open source community because it requires anybody who is building any tool to make sure that it can do age verification and gets in the way of the open source ethos, which is when you get it, you can rewrite it. You can do whatever you want. And so there is a big worry that open source is gonna, that some of the big open source packages and other things are not gonna be available in California. There's been some talk about it. It's also in uh Colorado, I think Texas, and I believe Brazil. Anyway, this is this is this is one of the ways in which age verification um the promise of age of age verification is spreading in ways that is really problematic and really represents not understanding some of the other values that are getting washed aside. It's not going to work either. Um, honestly, it I you know, I'll make a bet with you in three years if your kids are gonna be able to go online um and get what they want. Um so it's a it's a you know there are some very deep and horrible stories that have led for people to want to do something to protect kids online. I have all the sympathy for the in the world for that. Um but the answers that they're being sold um are not gonna do it and are really problematic for a lot of other things. So, you know, we're w we're on it. I mean, you know, the part of our problem is we don't like the whole law. So uh um the part about open source we care about a lot, but like I'm not all that interested in fighting for the car about as much as killing the whole thing. Um but if we you know, but but we do need at least the carve out for open source. It's an important thing and I think people need to be reaching out um to their representatives about this because I don't think that you know I mean there may be some some members of the California legislature who understood what they're doing, but there's not enough. Yeah, there's there's this is one of those areas where a failure to grasp the nuance of the technology really is a problem in the in the halls of power. And you know, it's easy to roll your eyes at people who say, oh, lawmakers don't understand technology, look at them making these dumb laws. But you know, if you're a person who like your experience of operating systems is maybe you bought a computer that had an operating system and maybe you upgraded it, you think of an operating system as this kind of reified special thing, and not, for example, as a thing where you might fire up a virtual machine and install an operating system on it for an hour and then do it a thousand times and then delete all those virtual machines. And the idea that each one of those is going to have an age verification step is itself just like deeply weird, right? It's like having age verification for salt sellers. Like it makes no sense, right? An age verification step for um a deed to your home might be silly, but it wouldn't be so onerous given all the other stuff that goes on when a ha when a house is being purchased. But an age verification step for putting salt on your fries just seems very weird and wrong in a in like a deeply impractical way. Yep. Yep. Uh do we have other questions for Cindy? A general question actually. The writing to the representatives using the online forms and then with the signature. Does it really work? Because we are inundated with information and so much of like Do re ps care if we send an online form that sends them a letter, elected representatives. For those of you who aren't following Cindy's eye line, she is eye contact with Hailey Sukiyama, who is our legis what's your title? Director of State Affairs. Uh who uh is the is the uh EFS rabbi on this subject. So uh she's also going on uh leave tomorrow so she would love your questions tonight. Does does sending these letters make a difference? I think it does. And I, you know, I look, it's there's a hierarchy, right? If you show up and say I want to talk to, you know, get on get on their audio, you know, actually meet with them, not show up unannounced, actually make an appointment and say I want to talk to you about this. Um that's better than if you you know call. If you call it's better than if you send an email. If you send an email and you write your own message, it's better than if you just kind of cli ck. But all of it's better than doing nothing. And um they yeah, they do, you know, the the the most that some offices might do is just count how many people wrote. Um, but even that, you know, when we were fighting Sopa Pippa back in the day, which was a censor a set of censorship laws on the federal level, like we melted down the switchboard of the of the members of Congress and we flipped that topic. So one person, it's one of those scale things, right? One person all by themselves, not that important. Get all your friends to do it too and get some real numbers. And honestly, especially state local there's a lot of people showing up at community meetings about like flock cameras and things like that. The the the the closer the government is, the more local it is. The fewer people you need to show up to have a difference, right? So um so I they do matter. I wish they mattered more, but it's not nothing because if nobody shows up , they just do what the lobbyists ask them to do. And while we have amazing lobbyists and Haley and and EFS lobbyists are great, we're outgunned and outnumbered by uh by the bad guys in almost every fight. So standing on the shoulders of giants, having ordinary people say, I understand about tech, EFF is right, you should listen to them. That that's one of the ways that we get listened to. Do you know I I I can tell you one of the way, one of the reasons that I think it matters, and it's because they they tr keep trying to take it away from us. So one of the campaigns that I worked at at EFF in the aughts, uh the Department of Agriculture was tasked with identifying and deleting quote substantively duplicative comments. And it was the Department of Agriculture because they oversee forestry and forestry uh has to contend with the Sierra Club, who are really good at sending a lot of letters. And so they said to to AG, why don't you write a program that looks at two emails from the public in an administrative uh comment docket and decides whether they're so similar that we can ignore them. And uh you just get to make up your own standard for this. And so we whipped a letter of groups to uh to to the Department of Agriculture to say this is a a bad idea and let us explain to you in technical terms why this idea is bad. And I think this was maybe the most successful sign-on letter we ever did because there wasn't a single political group in America of any striper description who thought this was a good idea. So we had like pro-gun people and anti-gun people and pro-abortion people and anti-gun people and flat earthers and people who wanted to go to space. And and Danny O'Brien, who was managing the letter, called me up and said, We're not going to let the Klan sign this letter, right? And I said, No, we're not going to let the Klan sign the letter. But everyone signed this letter. We're going to die to horror Yeah. I mean we're starting to deal with AI in some of this, right? There was a an issue I think in LA with the CR club recently where uh it looks like people are marshalling AI to do fake letters and lots of fake letters. So we're still gonna be fighting over this um uh because with every new technology, there becomes a a new way to both write to Congress and um fake it. And so um letters also. Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. More than a decade, but I only just discovered that in the UK, if you're a British citizen, you can show up at Com at the House of Commons when they're in session and demand to have your parliamentarian come out and speak to you. And they are legally obliged to either speak to you or send their secretary out to explain why they can't and to set a time when they will meet with you in person. Which is quite amazing. Other questions? Seth. Anecdote, but for visiting it so remember when we were working on a lot of these things some years ago, there were a lot of sort of blanket bad doctr ines that different parts of the government could raise, like the third party issue. Third party doctrine, yeah. Privacy. Maybe foreigners have no constitutional rights. Maybe like if a human doesn't look at it, doesn't count. too Uh how bad are the sort of blanket bad doctrines that are this infringements uh counting? And is there any sort of corporal progress in the sort of big bad doctrines? So Seth uh that's Seth Sean, he's uh EFF's uh original staff technologist. Um afterwards, if you want, you can ask him why we he'll have invisible yellow dots on his tombstone. Um So uh Seth is asking about these things called doctrines uh and and these these bad doctrines. So there's something called the third party doctrine, which says that if your phone company knows something about you, it's not private. If third party knows about you, it's private. Or if you're a foreigner, you don't have rights. Or um Oh yes, yes, yes. Uh if if if we collect information on you illegally but we don't look at it, it's not a violation of your privacy. Uh and he wanted to know how bad these are, what's the direction of travel, how's it going? I mean, it's a mix. Um I think we're making so the third party doctrine is a a doctrine actually that the courts created in the 70s with the idea that when you give information to a third party you lose your constitutional protection over over that. Um we're making inroads. We've had a couple of good Supreme Court decisions that um one about uh uh tracking you through your phone um and uh and and phone location data um and uh and another one where the third party doctrine should have meant that you didn't have any constitutional rights, and the Supreme Court magically said that you did. Um, so that was good. They haven't yet overruled it, but we've been chipping away at it. It's smaller than it it used to be, and we're going to continue to do that. Um, there's a there's a case in front of the Supreme Court now. I don't know if it's good to try on third party doctrine, but it's about geolocation. So this is where they show up at Google and they give them a subpoena and they ask for all the people. Geofense warrants, sorry, thank you. See he's been correcting me for a long time. Um geofence warrants and uh where they they show up and they ask um uh Google for everybody who's in a location rather than having to identify who their targets are. That's up in this in front of the Supreme Court in a case called Shah Tree right now. Um we'll see which way that goes, but that may end up taking another stab at um some of these doctrines. Um so we're working on them. I think the whether foreigners have rights or not is something that we fought in a in a a bunch of border search cases and we have not succeeded um yet on those. Um and I'm not sure under this administration there's that we're w things are gonna move too much, but maybe. Um and uh the other one is this uh this idea that they can collect everything and then as long as a computer looks at it rather than a human, it doesn't count. Um, we haven't been able to get at that yet. Um, so we're gonna keep at it. These are all three really um problematic doctrines, none of which, you know Moses came down um from a mountain um with it on a on a set of stone tablets so they're all things we can fix um but uh but they are there are three things that continue in our sights. I mean one of the things about the book um is that we don't win all the cases in the book. We we won the Bernstein case. That was really fun. It has a really lovely narrative of it and the government gave up and there's a nice scene where I get to go to Washington DC and uh negotiate the terms of surrender. Um in the NSA spying uh cases and the NSL cases, it's really more that we chip away. We still have a lot of work to do on both of those. Um, and we've tipped away a lot. The NSA spying does not look like it looked when Mar k Klein showed up in our office. Two of the three programs have been dramatically changed. Actually, all three of them have been changed a lot that we sued over. Um, but we still have a lot of ground to cover and all three of those doctrines are in our sites. And and just to to say that that is captured really well in the memoir, one of the reasons that these national security cases keep dying or or are moving slowly is because the government shows up in court and says you're not allowed to talk about this stuff because it's a secret. And that includes things that are on the front page of the New York Times. And the court says, I guess it's still a secret even though like this is a very special definition of secret that you can only comprehend if you've had the specific kind of neurological injury that accompanies becoming a certain kind of federal judge. But um but but it's this weird definition of secrecy that includes a thing everyone knows, but you're still not allowed to talk about. And and speaking of bad doctrines, I would put this in the realm of bad doctr ines that we have a thing called a secret that includes a thing everyone knows. So we're uh getting pretty close to the the making books non-returnable uh hour here. Um uh uh there weren't a forest of hands before, but if there are many people with questions, I might take three and give Cindy a speed round. So um I I see one from John. I see another there. Is there a third? Women like that question? Really? Really? I wrote this book because I think women need to Yay, thank you. Okay. So take these three questions in sequence. I'll make notes on them. I'll repeat them back and then uh Cindy will answer all of them. So let's start with you, John. All right. Well, Cindy, you've had a long illustrious career. What are you gonna do for an occur? Hold on to that thought. Okay. Why your impact litigation in the same kind of stay too? So just starting out, say uh the law of feature okay and then yeah go ahead yeah you can add wand and make some dramatic change just happen in the world. Do you think the world afterward would sustain that change on its goal? Oh, that was not a good thing. So here's our three questions, and I'll refresh you as you go through them if you'd like. So the the first one for John is uh having done so many wonderful and storied things, what are you going to do for an encore? Because we haven't said that tonight, but Cindy, you're retiring from EFF. The next question is what advice do you have uh on impact litigation for someone in law school, someone just starting out their legal career. And then the third one is a really cool spoiler of a question, which is if you could change one thing in the world, not what would it be? But rather do you think the change would sustain itself if you've changed it just by wishing it into existence. God, that's a hard one. So what am I going to do next? I'll be leaving EFF before the end of the year. We're we're still kind of talking about when. And I, you know, having sat at the the top of this amazing organization for eleven years, I just really feel like it's time to to pass the baton. Um, but it's also no secret at EFF that uh since I became executive director, I I have not written a brief or or made an oral argument because like the care and feeding of all the amazing uh people at EFF takes a lot of time. So I'm hoping to get back to that. I'm having some conversations with various different places to do that. But I uh as I as I promised the EFFers, I don't think I'm done suing the government yet. Um if I had a dream I would be a staff attorney at the EFF, but it turns out when you've been the boss for 25 years it's, not a very good idea. So um so I'm sure I will be working with EFF in some capacity, but um but not at EFF, I think after after a little break. I'm hoping to take a little break first too. Next question advice for young lawyers, beginning lawyers about uh getting into impact litigation. Well, you know, EFF has an internship program. Um and we have some fellowships that we often offer to young lawyers. So definitely find a way through your firm. If you're at a firm, it sounded like you might already be launched at a place to get involved with pro bono work and uh and doing, you know, kind of partnering with us and and, you know, look when when I started EFF was the first and only digital rights organization, now we have a diaspora of organizations that are doing all sorts of amazing work. So um we're still small in the number of people that we can take on and hire, but it's a huge community now. Well huge. It's still yeah. Yeah. It's still um it's still too small compared to the fights that we're up against, but you know, find ways to to to volunteer and and and and help because uh we can definitely use it. And um and if not us, you know, the ACLU has an amazing uh speech and technology uh group there's uh actually a bunch of um justice groups now that are doing um a lot of litigation in this area um uh groups that work much more closely in some ways with um kind of frontline communities. Um and they have digital issues now too. We we support a lot of groups kind of with the kind of high level information, but there's a lot of groups working on reproductive justice tr,ying to help people get access to information and get uh healthcare safe. That's just one example. There's a lot of groups that have the need for really smart attorneys who care about rights and who want to do impact litigation. So um start with us, of course. Um but but we're not the only ones now. And then if you could make one change in this world, do you think that change would be durable ? I think that if you can make a change that becomes the way people think the world ought to be and what they expect it to be, it becomes much more durable. And I I mean that while we still are fighting with encryption and we still see people taking s stabs at it, it's kind of unthinkable now that encryption would just be outlawed or require a license at the level that it did when we started in the 90s. And that's because A, we were right and and people like John were were foreseeking about how important it is, but it's also because we baked it into all the things in such a level that it just wouldn't I think it would be really hard. So um I you know I I I I'm I'm not normally a tech determinist, but I think that uh if you can build stuff in that everybody relies on and things are built on top of, it becomes hard to undo it. I think for la w and policy, the same can be true. Um, but it's a little harder and it takes a little longer for things to get baked in. It's Douglas Adams' aphorism that anything invented before you were 18 has always been there. Anything invented before you were 30 is amazing and wonderful and the thing you want to spend the rest of your life doing. And anything invented after that is terrible and should be outlawed. Do you think something to this idea that anything that's been around since you were a kid is effectively eternal, even if it's only like 10 minutes old? Yeah. Right? I I mean we we have like a whole bunch of things in American the way America does things. Even the idea that the NRA wants everyone to own a gun is is a pretty recent phenomenon. There was a time when the NRA was like a a select group of people who've been uh trained at great length about gun safety should have guns. This is not the NRA we know today. Um and yet we sort of assume that we'd like back to not having object permanence. We we we forget. I mean, and this is another one that I stole from Corey, which is, you know, the internet didn't used to be centralized such that they were just, you know, uh, you know, three or four big companies that provided all the things that most people's internet experience was just that. That's relatively new and we can undo it. Um and um and you know, it it I don't know how durable it would be, but it'd be worth trying. Well, thank you all very much for coming and thank you to C Light for hosting us. Remember that uh booksellers draw salaries and those salaries come from you buying books even if they're not our books uh and this store has kept uh itself open for hours with staff at the till and so on, so they need your support as well. Uh and Peter, where are we sitting? Is it is it's just here? We're just sitting here. So uh bring your books up and we'll uh we'll we'll scribble on them for you. Thank you . There's like all my girlfriend. Did I give you my retirement card? No? Okay, there it is. So I'm gonna give you a quick rugby for your mall thing. Tem.