Cindy Cohn

He built a simple encryption algorithm called Snuffle, and because federal law classified encryption as a war munition, publishing it meant submitting it to the government for review, getting a license as an arms dealer, and getting a license the government had no intention of granting.

He felt that violated his free speech rights, and in 1995 he sued, represented by Cindy Cohn working with EFF.

A Kafka loop.

You may publish provided you first obtain a permit we will never issue.

These enormous precedents, the load-bearing walls of digital life, come down to a young pro bono lawyer rattling a government attorney on a phone call in the 90s.

And she wasn't a household name then.

Cindy Cohn was a young pro bono lawyer working for EFF, and she went on to become EFF's legal director and then executive director.

She ran the place.

[upbeat music] This is Privacy's Defenders, a podcast about the people who fought to secure your digital civil liberties since 1990, long before most people even knew about the internet.

I'm Cindy Cohn, and I had the honor of serving as the executive director and the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for over 26 years.

Today's episode is all about the fight for encryption.

We're digging into EFF's seminal legal case against the federal government in the 1990s called the Bernstein case.

I got to hear, uh, I guess it's, uh, your, your CEO at Besides Orlando, I think she was one of the keynotes back in 2022.

Oh, uh, Cindy Cohn.

Yeah, our f- our former executive director, uh-

Okay

...

Cindy Cohn.

Um, she is, she has actually retired as of, uh, this year, and we have a new executive director, Nikki Ozer, who's also great, former head of, uh, ACLU NorCal, the head of their Public Interest Technology program there.

So, uh, we're really excited to have her.

Someday when we're pushing firmware updates to anti-lock braking systems or people's pacemakers, that will be an open book to griefers and foreign spies and what have you." And again, they were like, "Yeah, that sounds stupid.

Go away." So then we brought the lawyers in, and Cindy Cohn, my former boss, who's just retired from EFF and has written a wonderful memoir of this period.

Cindy Cohn...

Called Privacy's Defender, I should say.

Cindy Cohn formulated a radical argument.

She said the First Amendment protects expressive speech, and code is a form of expressive speech.

And a lot of people at the time were like, "I don't get it.