Read Cindy Cohn's new book, Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance

My copy of Privacy's Defender, signed by Cindy Cohn

I just finished reading Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, by my friend Cindy Cohn. It's excellent and you should buy a copy.

Cindy is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this memoir/legal history goes over three major legal battles in her career, all interspliced with personal stories from her life. It covers:

The fight in the 1990s to free cryptography from the federal government, including the constitutional decision that code is speech, and so it's protected by the First Amendment.
The fight to reign in NSA spying, from 2006 when whistleblower Mark Klein rung the doorbell at EFF's Mission District office and shared proof that the NSA was secretly making copies of all internet traffic going through AT&T's San Francisco building, to Edward Snowden's revelations and beyond.
The fight against unaccountable National Security Letters, and specifically the gag orders that prevent companies from telling their customers, the public, or Congress about demands for data from the FBI.

I'm mentioned in the book in a few small places. My favorite part, naturally, is this paragraph, in the NSA spying part of the book:

I'd later learn that it wasn't quite true that no one at EFF knew anything about the leaks. Micah Lee, who was one of EFF's technologists at the time and also served as the chief technology officer of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, had communicated with Snowden and helped to connect him with Laura. Micah had even helped Snowden try to build a website where he considered publishing a manifesto and a petition for supporters to sign. Micah did not tell me (or anyone else at EFF) about this until long afterward. As general counsel to EFF as well as lead counsel in the NSA cases, it was, to put it mildly, something I would have liked to have known. In the end Snowden decided against publishing the website, which was both the right decision and a great relief when Micah finally told me the whole story.

Sorry, Cindy!