I got an alert that Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance by Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was ready for me to pick up from the library. I didn’t remember putting it on hold and I could not fathom why I would want to read a memoir with such a seemingly bombastic title.
The title is a lot, but it’s accurate. Cindy Cohn has been defending privacy for 30 years. She’s especially been at the front of defending digital privacy as, and before, technology changes.
Cohn got into law because she was Jewish in a small not-Jewish town. She was told that if she didn’t participate in Easter stuff at school, her grades would be affected. So she talked to a lawyer who helped her maintain her grades, sans Christianity. That sold her on the career – lawyers get to protect civil rights AND waterski. (She later found that waterskiing was not related to the profession.)
Her career as a lawyer has been full of man-lawyers trying to intimidate her with a “let me tell you about your case, little girl” speech. These speeches were very helpful because they essentially gave her the opposition’s plan of attack.
And that’s good for privacy – so there’s a win for sexism, I guess, if it fells sexists.
She’s been involved in getting encryption on the internet, unearthing Patriot Act surveillance bullshit, and ongoing government surveillance in the U.S. She’s not writing encryption code or whistleblowing, but she’s the lawyer for those that do.
The legal story and personal story are mixed together because the book is explicitly a memoir. So she deals with family and starts a legal career. She goes to concerts and protects free speech. She’s on the Colbert Report talking about her work, while heartbroken over her husband’s affair.
Privacy is a part of her entire story. There is privacy in antisemitism, in being adopted, being divorced, and just in being a person. I’m not sure the balanced legal and personal stories worked, but it got the point across: privacy is not for secrecy, it is for control. Privacy is a check on power. It’s under attack.
(Also, it was kinda funny that better privacy laws and policies would have prevented her from finding her birth mother’s contact info. She fully understood the irony. )
I probably requested the book because I’m interested in privacy. And since I was already interested, I didn’t learn much. But it was still a good story and a good reminder that there are people fighting fights that need to be won.
