TL;DR: Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, releases her memoir Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance on March 10 via MIT Press. The book chronicles three pivotal battles: the 1990s Crypto Wars that kept encryption legal, the fight against NSA's post-9/11 dragnet surveillance, and the challenge to FBI gag orders. With endorsements from Edward Snowden, Senator Ron Wyden, and Bruce Schneier, it arrives as ICE deploys facial recognition at protests and FISA 702 faces reauthorization. National book tour runs through March at independent bookstores across the US. Hardcover proceeds benefit EFF.
Why This Book Matters Now
Cindy Cohn picked a hell of a moment to publish a memoir about fighting government surveillance.
ICE is running facial recognition on a 1.2 billion face database that includes Americans photographed at airports. The FBI just expanded its facial recognition to target domestic "threats." FISA Section 702, the law that lets the NSA collect Americans' communications without warrants, expires in 50 days, and Congress is fighting over whether to add more protections or fewer.
Into this mess arrives Privacy's Defender, a 248-page history lesson about how we got here and the people who've been fighting back since the internet was young.
Part One: The Crypto Wars
The book opens in the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration had a plan: the Clipper Chip.
The idea was simple. Every phone, every computer, every device that used encryption would include a government-designed chip. The chip would encrypt your communications, but the government would hold a backup key. If the FBI wanted to read your messages, they'd just use the key they already had.
Privacy groups, technologists, and civil libertarians lost their minds. So did a computer scientist named Matt Blaze, who discovered a flaw in the Clipper system in May 1994 that would let anyone bypass the backdoor entirely. The Clipper Chip died.
But the underlying fight continued. Encryption software was classified as a munition. A UC Berkeley mathematician named Daniel Bernstein wanted to publish his encryption algorithm, and the government said that would be illegal weapons export.
Cohn took his case. Bernstein v. DOJ argued that code is speech. In 1996, a federal judge agreed. The ruling eventually led to the relaxation of encryption export controls, making the secure communications we use today possible.
The Crypto Wars didn't end there. They're still being fought. But the legal foundation Cohn helped establish in the 1990s is why your iPhone can use end-to-end encryption without Tim Cook going to prison.
Part Two: The NSA Dragnet
In 2005, the New York Times revealed that the NSA was conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans' phone calls. EFF already suspected as much, and they had a witness.
Mark Klein was an AT&T technician who'd worked at the company's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco. He'd seen something strange: a secret room, numbered 641A, where the NSA had installed equipment to copy internet traffic flowing through AT&T's network. Not targeted surveillance. Everything.
In 2006, EFF filed Hepting v. AT&T, using Klein's evidence. The case alleged that AT&T had helped the government conduct unconstitutional mass surveillance of its customers.
Congress responded by passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted AT&T and other telecoms retroactive immunity from lawsuits. Hepting was dismissed.
EFF filed again: Jewel v. NSA, this time suing the government directly. The case dragged on for over a decade. The government argued that allowing the case to proceed would reveal state secrets. Courts agreed. In June 2022, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
No court ever ruled on whether Room 641A and the NSA's mass surveillance program violated the Fourth Amendment. The government won on procedure, not substance.
Then came Edward Snowden.
In May 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong with evidence confirming what EFF had been alleging: the NSA was conducting global mass surveillance, collecting phone records of millions of Americans, tapping into the servers of major tech companies, and vacuuming up internet traffic at scale.
Cohn's memoir reportedly covers EFF's response to the Snowden revelations: how the organization that had been fighting these programs in courts with limited evidence suddenly had documentation of exactly what they'd claimed.
Part Three: The Fight Against Silence
National Security Letters are demands the FBI can issue without a court order. They compel companies to hand over customer records, and they come with a gag order. Recipients can't tell anyone, including the targets, that the FBI asked for their data.
Since 1986, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs. The USA PATRIOT Act dramatically expanded their use. Companies receiving them faced a choice: comply silently or face contempt charges.
Nicholas Merrill ran a small internet service provider called Calyx in New York. In 2004, he received an NSL demanding customer data. Unlike most recipients, he refused to comply and challenged the letter in court, anonymously, because the gag order prevented him from revealing he'd received it.
EFF joined the fight. In multiple rulings, courts found NSL gag orders unconstitutional: violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. The government kept appealing, but the legal pressure eventually forced reforms that allow recipients to challenge gag orders after a waiting period.
In 2015, eleven years after receiving the letter, Merrill was finally allowed to reveal he was "John Doe" in the lawsuit. He could finally tell people the FBI had demanded his customers' data.
The gag order fight connects directly to today's surveillance debates. When the government can demand data in secret, there's no public accountability. When companies can't disclose requests, users can't make informed decisions about which services to trust.
What They're Saying
Edward Snowden
Snowden, whose 2013 disclosures confirmed what EFF had been alleging in court for years, endorsed the book, notably given that Cohn's legal work helped establish the framework that made his whistleblowing meaningful.
Senator Ron Wyden
The Oregon Senator who's been one of the few consistent congressional voices against mass surveillance. He's currently fighting for warrant requirements in FISA 702 reauthorization, the same issue EFF has litigated for decades.
Lawrence Lessig
The Harvard professor and copyright reformer, whose work on internet law parallels Cohn's on privacy. Both helped define what digital rights mean in practice.
Bruce Schneier
The security technologist and cryptographer who's been a leading voice on encryption policy since the Crypto Wars. He literally wrote the book on applied cryptography.
Book Tour: March 2026
Cohn is doing a national tour at independent bookstores, with notable guests at several stops:
- March 7: SCALE 23x Keynote (Pasadena, CA)
- March 10: San Francisco, CA, with Cory Doctorow
- March 12: Berkeley, CA, with Annalee Newitz (EFF launch party)
- March 13: Portland, OR, Powell's Books with Allison Morris
- March 17: Seattle, WA, Town Hall
- March 18: Menlo Park, CA, Kepler's Books with John Markoff
- March 20: Denver, CO, Tattered Cover with Marcia Hofmann
- March 24: Cambridge, MA, Harvard Book Store with Jonathan Zittrain
- March 26: Ann Arbor, MI
All hardcover proceeds benefit EFF.
The Book in Context
Privacy memoirs from digital rights leaders are rare. Most of the history of internet freedom exists in court filings, news archives, and organizational blogs, not in narratives that show how these fights felt from inside.
Cohn's timing is deliberate. She's stepping down as Executive Director. A new generation of privacy advocates is taking over. And the surveillance state she's been fighting for 30 years has only gotten stronger.
In 1993, the threat was the Clipper Chip, a backdoor in phones. In 2006, it was Room 641A, the NSA copying internet traffic. In 2026, it's $8.5 billion in ICE surveillance contracts, facial recognition in consumer glasses, and AI systems that can track anyone across a city.
The battles Cohn chronicles in Privacy's Defender didn't end surveillance. But they established legal precedents, built organizations, and trained the lawyers and technologists who are fighting today's version of the same war.
Book Details
- Title: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
- Author: Cindy Cohn
- Publisher: MIT Press
- Release Date: March 10, 2026
- Pages: 248
- ISBN: 978-0262051248
- Price: $26.95 (hardcover)
- Formats: Hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Available at: MIT Press, Amazon, Penguin Random House, Bookshop.org, and independent bookstores.
The Bottom Line
Privacy's Defender isn't just a memoir. It's a field manual for fighting surveillance, told by someone who's been doing it since before most smartphone users were born.
The Crypto Wars established that code is speech. The NSA cases showed how the government uses secrecy to avoid accountability. The gag order fights revealed how silence enables abuse. Every chapter connects to something happening right now.
ICE's facial recognition database? It's the 2026 version of Room 641A. FISA 702 reauthorization? It's the same fight EFF has been waging since Jewel v. NSA. Encryption backdoor proposals? The Clipper Chip never really died. It just got new names.
Cohn's stepping down, but the work continues. This book is her way of making sure the next generation knows how we got here.
References
- EFF - Privacy's Defender Book Page
- EFF - Privacy's Defender Book Launch Party (March 12, Berkeley)
- Amazon - Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
- EFF - Cindy Cohn Biography
- Wikipedia - Cindy Cohn
- Wikipedia - Crypto Wars
- EFF - Jewel v. NSA Case Page
- Wikipedia - Room 641A
- EFF - National Security Letters
- EFF - 10 Years After Snowden (May 2023)