Tenderloin, of course! I already miss this neighborhood - not to mention SF... One can always dream of returning there after Republicans left the White House... :)
"Cindy Cohn, an attorney who is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a digital-rights nonprofit based in San Francisco — said she sees her work fighting heavy-handed and intrusive government surveillance and defending technology users’ privacy, free speech and ability to innovate as fundamentally intertwined with principles that are at the core of U.S. democracy.
“Free speech is a cornerstone,” Cohn said, citing the practice of casting anonymous election ballots as an example. “Privacy is a cornerstone right. Privacy goes hand-in-hand with a democratic, self-governing system.”
Whether challenging restrictive federal rules equating cryptography with munitions, mass telecommunications spying by the National Security Agency, search-and-seizures of electronic materials or the use of surveillance technologies by the San Francisco Police Department, Cohn’s organization has long been at the center of civil-liberties controversies involving technology.
“Almost all the fights about rights and freedoms and democracy have a technical, have a digital element right now,” Cohn said.
Currently based in the Tenderloin, EFF was founded in 1990 before the mass adoption of web-browsing technology and the spectacular growth of the internet later in the decade.
The nonprofit today has about 125 employees, with the largest chunk being lawyers who engage in litigation and advocacy, Cohn said."
#EFF #DigitalRights #USA #California #SF #SanFrancisco #Privacy #Surveillance #FreeSpeech
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remixtures@tldr.nettime.org · 1 pts · 1y
Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
by Cindy Cohn
"A personal chronicle of three key legal privacy battles that have defined the digital age and shaped the internet as we know it.
From the very beginning, Cindy Cohn was driven by a fundamental question: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’s Defender chronicles her thirty-year battle to protect our right to digital privacy and shows just how central this right is to all our other rights, including our ability to organize and make change in the world.
Shattering the hypermasculine myth that our digital reality was solely the work of a handful of charismatic tech founders, the author weaves her own personal story with the history of Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.
Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, the book is a compelling testament to just how hard-won the privacy rights we now enjoy as tech users are, but also how crucial these rights are in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights."
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/