Public interest in government tech abuses is peaking. EFF’s new leader plans to build on that.
On the left, departing director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn. On the right, incoming leader, Nicole Ozer.
Back in 2022 when Cindy Cohn, the executive director of a US digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started writing her memoir, Privacy’s Defender, she worried that people would think she was an “old fuddy duddy” still sounding alarms about government spying online.
As one of EFF’s first litigators and then its longtime leader, Cohn witnessed firsthand how government surveillance became one of the earliest concerns for civil rights advocates when the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s. Since then, attention has pivoted away from caring about government’s Internet abuses to focusing much more on Big Tech harms, she said.
But then Donald Trump’s second term started, launching aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations nationwide that depended on abusing tech to support its goals of mass deportation. Railing against ICE raids, communities have quickly mobilized to defend online privacy, even banding together across political divides to tear down Flock cameras that can aid in arrests. Maybe even more concerning, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has increasingly sought to unmask ICE critics on social media—and largely failed—EFF has filed and backed lawsuits fighting to protect Americans’ rights to track ICE activity and share information anonymously online.
Published earlier this month, Cohn’s memoir traces the history of three big EFF lawsuits that marched an army of pioneers, hackers, and cypherpunks into courts to smartly translate technical concepts that judges couldn’t quite grasp and establish baselines for online privacy. It also spotlights the government’s moves building up its own cadre of experts to seize more subpoena authority in the name of national security, which Cohn suggested paved the way for feared abuses today.
Privacy’s Defender has suddenly become relevant again, she said, since the “Trump administration is willing to very openly do things that other administrations kind of were sneaky and hiding about.” That boldness, she said, has made it obvious how much the government’s spying today depends on Big Tech surveillance—like asking platforms like Facebook to reveal the identity of their users or app store operators like Apple to remove disfavored apps.
“I don’t have to convince people that government surveillance is equally important, if not more important than private surveillance,” Cohn said. “And also, that we don’t really have a choice, that what’s feeding government surveillance is private surveillance. There’s never been an either/or.”
For Cohn, public interest in fighting government surveillance is peaking at a moment when she has decided after 26 years to leave EFF. With new battle lines emerging on the artificial intelligence front, she told Ars that it’s “unhealthy” that nobody at EFF can remember a time when she wasn’t in charge. That’s why she thinks it’s time to pass the torch to the next generation.
Cohn’s not sure what comes next, as EFF’s fights go on without her. She told Ars that she was a “reluctant” EFF leader, yanked into the executive director role at a time when EFF was struggling financially.
Now, despite the economy perhaps making it harder for the nonprofit to survive on donations, EFF is in good shape to hand off, Cohn said. And her memoir can serve as a roadmap, to “hopefully inspire the next generation of computer people to think that they can show up and help really do things in a hands-on way, the way that the cypherpunks did.”
Fortunately for Cohn, who remains haunted by cases that didn’t establish the precedent that she wanted, that’s exactly the plan that EFF’s new executive director, Nicole Ozer, has in mind. Ozer told Ars that as she takes the reins, she plans to broaden support for EFF, bringing more unconventional voices into courts to spark a social movement strong enough to block the next wave of possible government tech abuses coming in the AI age.
Helping EFF “level up”
Ozer officially starts helming EFF on June 1, and she told Ars she plans to hit the ground running while strategizing new ways to support ongoing fights.
Unlike Cohn, who humbly downplayed her leadership skills while confessing she missed being a litigator, Ozer told Ars that she trained as a leader and strategist before becoming a litigator. She got her start in AmeriCorps, where she told Ars she learned “from some of the greatest strategists of the civil rights movement.”
“I went to law school specifically to work on these issues because I came from movement work, and I started to realize just how critical technology was going to be,” Ozer said.
Her work was “always focused on the intersection of movements for justice and technology issues,” she said. And eventually, those interests led her to partner for decades with EFF on important litigation, including partly while serving as the founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the ACLU of Northern California.
“I’ve worked together with EFF over the last 20 years,” Ozer said. “We’ve won critical civil rights cases at all levels of state and federal court. We’ve passed dozens of landmark laws. We’ve spurred global corporate change. We’ve built technology tools that people can use to protect themselves.”
Ozer told Ars that her priorities are to grow EFF internally and externally, expanding the organization’s resources by getting more people across America involved in its fights.
That’s doable, she expects, due to the current political moment.
When Ozer first got started, she said that “a lot of folks still saw technology issues as quite siloed from civil rights issues.” But she agreed with Cohn that some of the worst fears that longtime privacy advocates had while working to prevent government abuses are no longer speculative under Trump.
“I mean, people are literally getting gunned down by ICE, and there’s massive surveillance infrastructure that’s being weaponized against communities,” Ozer said. “The hypotheticals have really become the realities,” she said, and people recognize that “we can’t afford to be siloed right now.”
A social movement to block government AI abuses
Cohn expects Ozer is “really going to help EFF level up” by advancing EFF’s strategy and growing the community supporting EFF’s work.
Concerns about AI abuses could galvanize that support, Ozer told Ars. It’s clear that longtime talking points that privacy advocates have pushed about facial recognition and license plate readers have become intensified during the AI age, she said, with many people recognizing what’s at stake due to ICE activity prompting mass protests.
“We’re in a moment of another exponential increase in technology with the growth of AI,” Ozer said. “And we need everyone in this fight to build the digital future that we deserve.”
To Cohn, giving the public a say in how government uses AI is “existential.”
Her memoir recounts how impactful it was for judges to see cypherpunks, who were definitely not wearing suits, swarming courts to fight against government spying. And if Ozer is able to drum up support from the TikTok crowd, it could have a similar impact, signaling to courts that privacy fights, and other AI battles, affect real people’s daily lives.
Cohn suggested that if the midterms shake up government, there could be an opportunity for EFF and other advocates to get Congress to weigh bipartisan tech policy that prioritizes public interests over Big Tech’s.
Since EFF’s founding, the ever-elusive goal has been to pass a comprehensive federal data privacy law. For Ozer to succeed, Cohn expects that it will take a lot of political will. But Ozer has a plan, which is what Cohn said makes her a “perfect fit” for the executive director role.
Last year, Ozer wrote a technical paper outlining possible paths to put the American people in charge of US privacy law in the AI age. In it, she discussed key challenges to social movements fighting for protections against AI abuses. Perhaps most critically, she argued that just as Cohn found when fighting to protect encryption in the 1990s, the movement will need to craft a narrative around AI that gets courts and lawmakers to clearly see how civil rights could be harmed.
“My work is really informed by social justice in the digital age and ensuring that the AI age really needs greater access and equity and justice,” Ozer said. “And so that’s what animates me—leading with vision and clarity and eyes open to the challenges—but always really focused on what can be achieved when we work together with purpose.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
