Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Woman Taking On Big Tech: She Fought the Government and Won

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Are we losing our right to online privacy entirely? Support my independent journalism: 🙏 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz   ⁠ 🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: ⁠https://www.usermag.co   ⁠ In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sat down with Cindy Cohn, former head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and author of the new book Privacy's Defender. We dive deep into the secret history of the early internet, the terrifying reality of mass online surveillance by the US government, and how "age verification" laws sweeping the US will destroy digital civil liberties for everyone. Cindy explains how the NSA and FBI use massive legal loopholes like Section 702 to secretly access your data for domestic purposes, the massive security dangers of forcing users to upload their IDs to access apps like Discord, and why the fight to protect encryption is more crucial now than ever. If you care about your digital rights, free speech, and the future of the open web, this is a must-watch conversation!!  Topics Covered:The 90s hacker origins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)How the Bernstein case saved internet encryptionPost-9/11 mass surveillance and the government's data grabWhy the FBI and NSA's use of Section 702 threatens your privacyThe truth about the government buying your personal data from private brokersWhy age verification laws banning users under 16 create massive security risksHow to fight back and become part of the next generation of privacy advocates 

This already happened with Discord, right? There was a data breach where all these pictures of people holding up their IDs, you know, leaked out, right? I don't think we do anybody any favors by creating security problems for everyone. In an era where personal data is increasingly collected, analyzed, and monetized. The idea of privacy as a concept seems increasingly fragile. But few people have spent as much time trying to protect it as Cindy Cohn. She's the former head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a legal pioneer at the forefront of the fight for digital civil liberties.

Cohn has helped shape some of the most consequential legal battles over things like encryption, surveillance, and free expression. Her work has not only influenced courtrooms and policy debates, but has helped define what it means to have rights in the online world. She has a new book out called Privacy's Defender, and today I'm so excited that Cindy Cohn is joining me to talk about that book and to discuss her work fighting against mass online surveillance, a big battle coming up in April in Congress, the spate of age verification legislation sweeping the U.S. and what the next generation of privacy leaders need to know.

Hi, Cindy. Welcome. Hi, Taylor. So nice to get to talk to you. I'm such a fan. I'm really going to try to not totally fan girl this entire time. And I'll try not to fan girl right back. It's a love, love thing here. Well, I want to sort of start by talking about your background and how you got into this fight and kind of how, you know, you've had this long career. You live through this era of tech that I've always been very jealous of, which is sort of the 90s. Obviously, I was alive. in the 90s, but I was a child and didn't even have internet access, really. But you kind of talk about being in San Francisco in this era, meeting the former, I think, director of the EFF.

Where were you in the 90s when the internet was just being born? And how did you get involved in this whole digital rights world? Yeah, I kind of fell into it. You know, I was an English major and a new lawyer. I just spent some time working at the UN Center for Human Rights in Geneva. And I landed in San Francisco in part because my brother was there. And I fell in with some of these hackers. And, you know, I used that term in the old school may of people who really hacked at a problem until they got it right rather than the kind of more nefarious thing.

And they literally, a bunch of them showed up at a party in my house in the Haydashbury area. I started dating one of them. And another one was a guy named John Gilmore who was founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So I literally fell in with these guys. But I also saw immediately what they were doing, which was communicating over great distance, constantly collaborating, organizing over this new network. This is before the World Wide Web. And having come out of the human rights world, I saw the possibilities of this new digital world to help people organize and make change in their lives. So we found pretty good common cause around it because they were seeing that as well. And so I kind of, I fell in with them.

And then a few years later, John called me and asked me if I'd take an early internet case. I did. And so we could talk more about that. But I really, I didn't come at this because I'm a deep geek. I think those are sometimes the best, the best kind of like, you know, people that come to this industry, right? Like so many different people kind of come to these issues through so many different lenses.

And I think your background kind of outside of that world is interesting and falling into it in such an early time. I was trying to look back at like what the internet was like back. And it's so hard to comprehend. I mean, just the concept of like a long distance phone call also that you have to like pay by the minute. You have to pay more if it was like further away to talk to someone. It seems just so bizarre right now. Can you talk a little bit about the landscape back then and why this this first case that you took on ended up being very relevant?

Yeah. I mean, I had just come back from living in Geneva where, you know, I'd have to watch my watch, right? Because if you went more than three minutes, it got really, really expensive to talk to my family. and set up times to be able to talk to them and deal with the time zones and stuff like that. And we still deal with some of that, but we get to do so much to say synchronous now. So yeah, it was really crazy. But we're not talking user interfaces, right? It's a big black screen that you type on with, you know, green letters usually and old school hackers

will still do that today on the command line. But it predates, you know, when we had user interfaces and things like that. So things have gotten a lot better for like ordinary people to be able to do this. You know, I've always thought of myself as a translator, especially since I got involved in tech. And, you know, what I'm pretty good at is understanding technical stuff enough so I can explain it to people who aren't technical. Of course, most, you know, centrally judges. And at the time, especially, we didn't have a lot of technical judges. We have some now. So about three or four years later, John Gilmore calls me and he says, I've got this math PhD student

who wants to publish a computer program on the internet. And if he does that, he'll go to jail as an arm stealer. And I said, well, what does it do? Does it blow things up? And he said, no, it keeps things secret. Do you want to take the case? And I thought, well, that seems wrong. You should be able to publish ideas that keep things secret.

And of course, one of the things that John and the other founders of the EFF and early internet people were realizing is that if we were going to have any kind of privacy or security online, we needed to free up encryption technology. And encryption is what this program that the math student wanted to publish did. So they saw this as a vehicle to try to take on the way that the U.S. government treated encryption in the 90s and make it so that we can have a private conversation online. We can do commerce online. We have security as well.

So they brought me this case and asked me if I would do it. And I pretty quickly said yes because I could see what they were seeing about the need for privacy and security online. So we put a First Amendment case together and launched it a year two later. And, you know, ultimately there was a lot of twists and turns along the way, but ultimately we were successful, the government backed down. And that's why we have the security that we have on the Internet today. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not a secure place, the Internet. It's not a private enough place.

But we would be in a much worse place if we didn't have this basic building block tool that we could use. That was back in the sort of like mid-90s. Tell me how your career progressed after that. Was that the moment that you realized like, okay, I really want to get involved in fighting specifically for rights online? Yeah, I think so. It was really fun. I had to make a decision that that, in about 2000, I got asked to join the FF full-time. And I was still doing human rights work.

And I actually had a big human rights case that I was doing at the same time. But I had to make a decision about, you know, kind of leaning into this new tech world. And honestly, we were really successful in the Bernstein case, but also it was a lot of fun. And it was fun to do kind of something lawyers don't get to do very much, which is think about what the world looking ahead is and think about how to marshal the legal doctrines in this entirely new environment. And it was really exciting and fun to think that way. A lot of what lawyers do is fight about the past.

That's a precedential system and things like that. So it was really fun. I ended up getting to continue to do my human rights work too, but that was kind of a long But yeah, I decided that this would be important and fun to get to do and a fight worth having. I, you know, I think about privacy especially and security both, but privacy is one of the ways that people with less power have some protection against people who have more power. And I've always looked at it this way and it's, it kind of frames why privacy is important in a way that's a little different than how you see it sometimes where, you know, people think it's like this hair. Potter cloak of invisibility, you throw over your head when you're going to do something you don't want anyone else to know about it.

It does do that too. But to me, what it's important for is it it lets people without power have a space to organize and talk to each other and work to make change collectively. And I could see how that was the promise of what the internet could do, but that it was going to need people who were willing to get in there and fight for it. Yeah. Well, you came. I mean, it's so crazy.

Like, I feel like the late 90s and then early 2000s. especially after 9-11, we saw, I mean, the explosion of the internet, but also the, you know, this like aggressive attack on privacy, we started to see mass surveillance. You quote Michael Hayden, former NSA CIA director who said, we kill people based on metadata. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about your work kind of fighting the NSA and dealing with kind of like government incursions into online privacy after 9-11 and into sort of the 2010s. Yeah, I mean, 9-11 really shifted a lot of things. And one of the big things that it shifted for the national security folks who, you know, this was the greatest national security failure in the history of the United States to date. And they decided that the thing they needed to do was to give everybody less privacy as a result of that.

You know, the 9-11 commission actually took a couple years to actually look at what caused 9-11. And it didn't turn out that it was our rights that got in the way. but by then things were really rolling. And the government really became enamored of this idea that if they could just surveil everybody all the time, they would be able to protect us better than they had been later. And so that mentality still exists. And in fact, we're seeing it, you know, all the way down to the ground, all the way down to like our license plate readers and cameras all over the place.

Like it's the same mentality, this idea that if we can surveil ourselves to safety. I have some problems about that. I'm not sure it really works, but I also think there's a lot of a lot we lose when we go into that. And we're also starting to see that right now. But a lot of the things that are front of mind for people right now in today's privacy fights are kind of the Trump administration and taking advantage of a bunch of things that previous administrations put into place. And they would tell us, oh, well, don't worry, you know, the government might need this power against very bad guys, but they would never misuse it in other ways.

The government would never misuse power. That's crazy. I mean, the reason we had all of these laws from the first place was when they caught the Nix administration spying on everybody in the 70s when I was a little girl. But it wasn't a very good justification even then. And I think now people are really seeing how hollow it is. If you're watching this video and you like my work,

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Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams, and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. I'm curious your thoughts on how bad it is. Like for a lot of people and I talk to a lot of young people as well who have really come of age during the Trump administration. And like, I mean, as millennial, like, you're sort of most of our, like, lives are defined by like, I mean, Bush when we were kids, but mostly like Obama and then Trump. And there's this idea

that Trump is sort of like uniquely bad or abusing, you know, these laws in unique ways. And I'm curious, given your long perspective, like, is how much of an acceleration are we seeing in terms of loss of our rights or are these attacks sort of consistent throughout time? I think this is really unprecedented in some way. but it's not like it came out of the blue. Again, after 9-11 and with a bunch of other things, there were a lot of holes torn in the fabric of our rights, both constitutionally and statutorily.

And now we've got an administration that's willing to just drive a truck through all of those holes and claim even more power than those holes allow them. You know, and also the attacks on rule of law, the kind of unwillingness or at least shakiness of them abiding by corridors and stuff, that's pretty new. I mean, you know, I've brought up against government attorneys who are willing to kind of weasel around court orders and, you know, but not at the level of audacity that we're seeing now. So I think it's not a difference in kind. It's a difference in degree, but it's a pretty dramatic change. And so I don't think it's it's right to say, oh, well, this is all the same stuff that the, you know, Obama administration did. It's actually new. It's bigger. It's worse. But the Obama administration and the Biden administration, did smaller versions of this and they also refused to fill the holes.

You know, Obama campaigned on stopping the mass spying that Bush had done. And then he flipped. He signed into law, this law that called BISA Section 702 that is, you know, that we're fighting right now that's up for renewal in April. And Obama, you know, I think did a 180 on this. And so it's not like they're above reproach. This kind of gets back to the early fights that that we did. We learned after September 11th that the government was doing a lot of spying, but it was hidden from the American people.

And they were kind of lying about it. They were absolutely lying about it. And in 2005, late 2005, the New York Times broke a story about Bush spying on Americans in America. In early January of 2006, we had a whistleblower show up in our front door at EFF with some of the schematics of how some of this worked. And we sued based on it. And we had this suit going for 17 years against it. We were doing okay. We kind of go up and down and up and down in the courts, but we were doing okay. And then ultimately, Congress passed a law called FISA Amendments Act.

And section 702 of that act purported to make some of the mass spying that we had been suing over legal and also give congressional oversight and also make some of it subject to the secret FISA court. And Congress said, we'll see, you know, we fix the problem. They're not doing it in secret and off the books anymore. So now it's on the books and it's got some oversight and you know our position was no no no we wanted you to stop it We didn't want you to legalize it But the one thing Congress did was make and this is the way that they're tapping into the internet backbone So the one of the programs that we uncovered was the the government is those two like our service providers AT&T and Verizon that carry a lot of our internet

Traffic on what the internet they call the backbone because it's deep in the internet and they tap into it and they basically suck off a copy of everything and then they use that for secret stuff that we don't know that they say it's only going to be used in ways that we should all trust are always perfect so that's the program that's one of the programs that's up there that's up in front of this but the one thing Congress did was make this authority expire periodically supposed to be every two years Congress keeps kicking it down the road but the next time that it expires is in late April so EFF and a bunch of other civil liberties along with a lot of senators now and some members of Congress are trying to get even more reforms into it. One of the things we know that the government is doing with this is they suck it in under the grounds of national security, but then the FBI gets to search it for domestic purposes. And some people will call this the back door. And so that's one of the very kind of front of mind things that people are trying to shut this back door, this loophole into this data. that was supposed to be originally used by the NSA to protect us from terrorists and now is being used by the FBI for reasons that we don't even know all the reasons it's being used.

So that's one of the big reforms that people are trying to support. Again, you know, I don't think they should be doing mass spying. I don't think it's consistent with the Constitution. But one of the things we've learned over time is while we keep that as our goal, we chip away and chip away and chip away. And that's that's kind of the lesson of the post 9-11 fights is that we both have to aim high and chip away where we can. Then we have a chance to chip away a little more in April. Yeah, it's coming up.

I'm curious, you know, like I feel like we've seen the expansion, especially over the past 15 years of a lot of surveillance-driven business models through advertising and just the explosion of the online ads industry, social media built on the back of advertising, et cetera, search, I guess was too. And also we've seen the government seek to let us. more and more commercial data, you know, in their quest to kind of violate people's privacy. When you think about sort of big threats to people's privacy, I think you've been asked this before, like, which is the greater threat, like the government or corporations, but it seems like they both are, but they have this like symbiotic relationship almost. It seems like they kind of feed each other. Yeah. I mean, I would love a world in which I get to pick, you know? Are you more worried

about companies? Are you more worried about the government? Nobody's offering us that choice. And that's because, you know, right now, the number one purchaser of information from the private data brokers is the government. And FBI director Cash Patel just testified last week in front of Congress that, yes, they do and they're going to keep doing it unless Congress stops them. And so it's not a choice that we have. And they do have, as you said, a symbiotic relationship. Even the NSA spying cases that we sued over in the mid-2000s, you know, the government didn't come to us to ask us for our data. It went to AT&T and Verizon. And there's a whole other program called Prism where they went to internet, you know, to the Facebooks and the Googles of the world.

So they've already used leverage. The fact that we're reliant on all these companies for our telecommunications and communications services to do this mass spying. So we just don't have that luxury anymore. And, you know, but it's something we could do. We could decide that if the company gathers information about us, they can't get it. it to the government. That would be a good step. I would like to see them not be able to collect information for one purpose and then use it for other purposes and get back to kind of what people is a much more reasonable deal for you and me. We give our information because we want our calls

to, you know, our phones to ring at the right place, not because we want to be sold off to this business model. So, you know, EFF did a, we did a white paper a few years ago called privacy first where we looked at what if we had a comprehensive privacy protection what other social problems would get better even if they don't get fixed as a result of just centering privacy I think any privacy law needs to not just include the private companies but also include the government because the government's doing a lot of direct collection itself too but at a minimum it ought to make sure that just by using a service we're not feeding the government surveillance

machine and you know I don't like the surveillance business model I think it's really bad and dangerous. But we're in a time when the government is sweeping people up off the streets in pretty horrific ways as a result of collecting data both directly and from the private companies. So I think stopping that should, you know, would be my priority if I had to list them. But I think we have to look at the whole thing. You guys have been doing great work on the age verification laws. The EFS has this great age verification hub. There was a poll that came out today that I don't know their methodology. Who knows how legit this poll is, but it's getting shared a lot.

That 72% of people support banning users under the age of 16 from social media and doing this through age verification. It seems like we're closer than ever to losing our privacy. What are your thoughts on the rise of this sort of like broader push for age verification? Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for some of the families who've had horrible things happen to their family members, to their kids and stuff as, you know, that they are attributing to social. media. And I think the problem that I have is not that that wasn't horrible or that didn't happen, but that I don't think age verification is the right answer to that problem. And I think they are jumping to something because it feels like an easy fix to what is actually, I think, not going to work. You know, age verification is a privacy problem, right? You know, people have

to give information. This already happened with Discord, right? There was a data breach where all these pictures of people holding up their IDs, you know, leaked out, right? I don't think we do anybody any favors by creating security problems for everyone as a result of this. And so it's a, it's a privacy kind of nightmare. And I don't think it's going to work very well. And I also think, you know, this is about access to information. And I really don't think it's the right frame to think that denying kids access to information is how we make them safer. I think that is really problematic. kids have First Amendment rights too, kids have freedom of expression too, and they do so for good reason. I don't think, you know, like having children raised in her medically sealed boxes and then opening those boxes at age 16th and subjecting them to the world is actually going to make them, you know, I don't know if it makes them safer, but it doesn't make them ready to be citizens.

So there is a real problem. There's some horrific stories and I think they're important to pay attention to. I just worry that they're getting sold this bill of goods as if age verification is going to imagine. solve the problem and I'm skeptical and there's a lot of downside to doing it. And in California and Colorado right now, you know, the bill was written so broadly that it's going to kill the open source movement. Like there's a whole bunch of things that I don't even think it's their goal. I might be being too nice to them, but like open source is one of the ways we get out of the problem of tech giants.

I think that's the other piece of this is that a lot of people are so mad at the Facebooks and Googles and Twitter, you know, X, that they think, oh, we'll just hurt those guys by making them do age verification. And it's not going to hurt them. It's going to mean that we're going to be stuck with them as a result of it. And I think it's counterproductive. Yeah, it's also worth noting, too. They're saying 16 now, but Jonathan Haidt, who's really the leader of this movement,

went on Bill Maher last month and said the ultimate goal is 18. And they don't think anybody under the age of 18, yeah, should have access to the internet. You know, we did this very unscientific survey about a year so ago where we asked kids to tell us, how important the internet was to them. And we got thousands of stories of kids and especially LGBTQ kids or kids who were being raised in places where they weren't safe in their homes or they weren't welcomed in their homes because their views might be different than their parents or their loved ones who are taking care of them who over and over again said,

if it weren't for the internet, if it weren't for my online friends, I wouldn't be alive right now. This is my lifeline. This is my community. This helps me in a time, in a place where I don't feel safe. And I just think it's irresponsible to be legislating as if everybody lives in a two-parent household, you know, this kind of straight out of, I don't know, some kind of idealized family situation. That's not it. And when you look at the harm, I mean, you've done a lot of this reporting, Taylor, when

you look at the harm that even Facebook says, what they say is upper middle class white girls have a hard time online because we're already, and I mean we, I mean, I'm not a girl anymore but because we already have body issues and other kinds of things that that can be really made worse but LGBTQ kids kids who come from marginalized communities and other things they get helped by the internet so it's not okay to have a one-size-fits-all kind of rule you know in my darker moments I say you know protect the kids whose kids right because you're absolutely hurting a whole set of kids who in general in our society we don't take very good care of to begin with with a rule like this.

Also, the internet is a lifeline for middle class white girls too. Like, I mean, it's how like so many women discover the body positivity movement. Like I learned about feminism on the internet. Like, yeah, I mean, I just hate it. I've been working. I was this morning at this day labor center where the with this immigrants rights group. And they're terrified and these immigrant workers have thrown away their cell phones. Some of them are now living on the street because they can't, they're so scared to even

have a cell phone or haven't to be contacted by anyone because they know that they're going to be surveilled and their family members are getting taken away and they have children too and so yeah it's very much a case of of whose children oh i'm so horrified to hear that but yeah i mean that's the other piece is like the internet social media is not just a like frivolous thing right like people run their businesses people run their lives people get jobs people build community it's it's it's far too serious a thing to decide that we can just like kick off a whole bunch of people who don't have IDs, don't have legitimate. And it's not just kids, right?

Like the way that the ID things work is going to hit a whole swath of people who don't have a lot of resources. Absolutely. And I mean, you've talked a lot about encryption. I'm concerned that the fact that the way they've defined social media is also just like any messaging app, like WhatsApp was included in the New Mexico case. Like, I mean, I think they're coming for a signal. Like already we have in the EU, it seems like they're trying to break encryption.

There's talk of banning VPNs. I can't remember Montana or some state was talking about it. Like it seems like we're just backsliding. I'm curious how you remain sane. And like, I don't know. Like is this fight? Like I talked to a lot of people that are just like, it seems so fruitless. Like is it worth even fighting?

Like have we already like lost privacy? Like are we never going to have a free and open internet? You know, is that dream gone? I mean, look, we have to fight for it. And I kind of look at it slightly differently, which is like we have two choices, right? We can fight and we might. lose or we cannot fight and we lose. I think it's a somewhat privileged position to say, well, we're just going to give up. That comes from a place where they're apparently not picking up

your neighbors and throwing them, you know, deporting them. They're, you know, the loss of privacy and the concerns might be a little more abstract, but they're increasingly not abstract. If you're people seeking reproductive help and you got to cross a border, you've got to get organized on that. If you're dealing with immigration, if you're observing the police and and engaging, in your First Amendment right to film or observe the police. The number of people who are targeted by this administration is great and it's changing. So even if you think you're safe now and you can just opt out and say like, I guess it's all over. I don't have to, I can't fight anymore. Like I think that's a somewhat privileged position because I don't think we have a choice

but to try to push forward. That's kind of the hard side of it. I think the good side of it is, you know, for me anyway, it's been full of fun people. It's been full of exciting work. I like standing up in a righteous fight. You know, I've been telling my friends, I feel a little like I'm the, I'm like the doctor in the emergency room. Like, I am not happy that the accident happened, but I'm here to try to patch it up as best I can. And I know this is a righteous fight. And I'm glad that I'm in it and I'm in it with the people who I'm in it with. And don't get me wrong. Like, I know there's, you know, there's a story like, you know, the real victory had was the friends we made along the way. Like, I'm not saying that. I am,

I like to win. We have to win. This is important. But you do meet amazing people. You know, I maintain that the good guys are better parties and the bad guys. And so when things are rough, you know, I try to find a little quiet space to step back for a little while and then come back again because these the fights here, whether you, you know, again, I don't think very many people, even if you can opt out of it today, you're not going to necessarily feel comfortable that you can act out of it tomorrow. In your book, you talk about kind of like recruiting the next generation of privacy advocates. And number one, why do you think like young people should get more involved in this fight? And what do you think are some of the most effective ways for them to engage on this issue? I feel like I hear so much nihilism in that sense too where like a lot of young people don't even really necessarily believe in free expression or free speech or some of these sort of core ideals around privacy. So how do you reach them and how do you, you know, like what are the best ways to kind of like get them involved? I mean, I think the first thing is the world is starting to reach them. Like, you had the luxury of not worrying about privacy or free speech when you had access to abortion information

and the ability to go, you know, get reproductive help in ways that we're not going to get you thrown in jail. We've got a mom and a daughter in Nebraska and the mom serving two years in prison for talking about helping her daughter get an abortion over Facebook Messenger. Like, it's not going to be optional very long for very many people to be. be I think nihilistic. I think that that we just have to do it. I do think, you know, how do you reach people about what they can do? Well, I always start with like, what do you care about? I mean, I've been lucky in my life. I've been very fixed on wanting to help make the world a better place and very flexible about how I did that. And then stuff happened. And I figured it out. Like, I didn't write a 12-point plan when I was 20 years old or 18 years old about what I was

going to be this job didn't exist. So I think that giving yourself the space to think about how do I make the world a better place based on what I see right now and what I can do right now is great. And what you can do right now might be to help with a project to do this. It might be to volunteer in something. And then you'll see what the next thing is. You know, my friend Corey Dr. Rowe talks about like we might not be able to see the victory, but we can always see higher ground. And I really love that framing of it. and thinking about, okay, well, what do I care about? What can I do? We need designers.

We need influencers. We need people who are willing to, you know, if you're a technical and of course, many EFF supporters are like there's so many open source projects that could use somebody to help them. And oh my God, please write user interfaces that people can use. You know, we, we, whatever your skill set is, we need you. And if you don't know what your skill set is, think about what calls to you. and where you want to be. Like there's there's plenty of of space to step in and do these things. But I think the one thing that there isn't is one clear path. If you just sign on to it,

you don't have to think anymore. And then people are going to hand feed you all the things you need to do. We're in a time when a lot of the techniques around pushing back against repression and authority and the surveillance business model, they're pretty well counteracted by the bad guys. We're using techniques that were dealt with. develop many of them in the civil rights era. We need the next gen. So, you know, I think the bad news is like we can't just do the same playbook that that we've used in the past. The good news is there's space to think different. There's space to be innovative. I mean, I, you know, little things like the people in Oregon showing up in those crazy costumes in the, in the

protests, like that shifted the dynamic. We need more of that kind of thinking and we need it in the online world as much as in the offline world if we're going to if we're going to have a chance to regain things. The good news about this is that we've solved harder problems in this country, right? We have solved much harder problems than we built a surveillance state. We need to dismantle it. And we've got an authoritarian government. We need to get past, we need to toss them out and get other things. Those are very hard problems. I'm not going to say they are. And we didn't get into this mess because of one thing and we're not going to get out of it for one thing. But like, we don't have to end slavery. We don't have to give women the vote. Like those are, those are

in my mind, much harder battles than the ones that we have now. And even if they're just as hard, we don't have any option any more than, you know, those people did. Well, Cindy, thank you so much for joining me and chatting with me today. I highly recommend everybody follow you and read your work. And yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time. Oh, thank you so much, Taylor. Thank you for letting me come talk about my book and the work of EFF. We are huge fans at EFF. Whenever you mention us, everybody's like, Taylor, the Red said something. So we really think that you're, bringing a perspective that's important to a different audience than we normally reach. And it's just, it's tremendously important. So thank you.

All right. That's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. My work is entirely self-funded. So truly every single dollar of every subscription that you buy makes such a difference and keeps the show going. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of free speech Friday, see you then.