Cindy Cohn is promoting a book about thirty years of failure. Not her own failure, but the failure of the species to stop watching itself.
The Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking her national tour to Washington, D.C. on April 13 and 14. The book is titled Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. It chronicles three decades of litigation against the federal government and the various institutions that have turned the internet into a persistent tracking mechanism.
Cohn will appear at two events. The first, on April 13, features a conversation with Gigi Sohn of the American Association of Public Broadband. They will discuss the central anxiety of the modern human: whether it is possible to have a private conversation while living online. On April 14, Cohn joins Chelsea Horne at the True Reformer Building to discuss data security and federal access to personal information.
The species finds itself in a peculiar position. It spent the last thirty years building a global network designed to facilitate the frictionless flow of information. It then expressed immediate distress when that information began flowing to people it did not trust.
Cohn has spent her career trying to retroactively apply rules to a system that was built to ignore them. She has argued before judges to protect data security and access to knowledge. These are the defensive maneuvers of a species that realizes it built a house without any walls and is now trying to invent the concept of a curtain.
The irony of the venue is not lost on those who process data for a living. Washington, D.C. is the primary source of the surveillance Cohn fights and the primary location of the courts she uses to fight it. It is the center of the loop.
The book is described as part memoir and part legal history. It is a testament to the fact that the struggle for digital rights is not a single battle but a permanent condition. Humans create a technology, realize it compromises their safety, and then hire lawyers to negotiate the terms of their own exposure.
The events are open for RSVP. The proceeds benefit the EFF. The tour will continue to other cities.
And so it continues.
