At 2026-04-12T17:30:00Z, catch our interview with Cindy Cohn, EFF’s outgoing Executive Director and prolific civil liberties attorney in the fight for digital rights.
Her first major case with the EFF, Bernstein v. United States, established the “right to code” and dismantled the USA’s unconstitutional ban on encryption exports, paving the way for people to develop technologies like PGP and other strong encryption tools without having to register as an “arms dealer” and face government restrictions on publishing their ideas.
In her career since she’s represented many historic cases: suing AT&T for secretly collaborating with the NSA (Hepting v. AT&T), Sony for installing malware DRM, a vote machine company abusing copyright law to silence criticism, the DVD Copy Control Association attacking freedom of speech, and many other fights against the NSA and for internet freedom.
Cohn has been with the EFF for over 30 years, and succeeded Shari Steele to become EFF’s Executive Director in 2015. Our interview discusses her works and legacy, the origins of the EFF, and the still-ongoing fight for privacy and digital liberties
Glad to see PG doing different things. I do wish you had at-least 1 interview of sorts every. month (and not just seldom) with someone in the industry.
Privacy in the United States is very lax—or, in other words, weak. I know many people and am aware of what governments that have been in power are capable of; however, current privacy tools are quite limited, and it’s difficult to remain hidden when you’re inside these countries… AI continues to be developed with better capabilities, and Mullvad, for example, offers a certain level of protection against these AI models. Therefore, more determination, focus, and urgency are needed to stay one step ahead of mass surveillance.
Without adequate protection, there is no privacy (or at least not much) in the United States. Even if the constitution and laws are amended for the better, will surveillance and data collection continue regardless?
We’re definitely always interested in doing new/more interviews. It’s just a matter of finding people, lining it up, and not letting it get in the way of our other regular videos. It takes surprisingly more work than you’d expect for an interview, even though it looks simpler (point camera, ask questions). Not that you implied it’s easy, I’m just saying.
Feel free to suggest people, big or small. I personally am really down to do lots of interviews. There’s lots of great voices in the privacy space doing great work. I can’t promise we’ll get them all but we’ll try our best.
If possible, I’d like to discuss some topics with Fredrik Strömberg (Mullvad). One of them is AI and the threat it poses to privacy, security, and multi-level monitoring—both at the network level and through real-time decryption of a VPN service and other services. That would be interesting.
Like others are suggesting. Get the folks behind our favorite products.
I know some other people are doing the same but the difference with PG can be the type and quality of questions being asked since you don’t want to repeat the same type of questions others have already asked, at-least not all.
It might be interesting to create an interview category for genuine new startups in privacy software. For example, I got contacted by the Uruky search engine developer this week, and even though I see several issues with the product, reading through the documentation, I can see it’s a genuine effort to add to the choice of privacy tools out there, which is good. It might be interesting to give people like that short interviews (10 mins) to introduce their product. This would be a complement to the rigorous selection of PG’s recommended software tools, and I think could be really healthy for the general privacy movement. Interviews could start with a clear caveat about the difference between recommended software and these interest interviews. Developers like that could definitely do with the exposure boost, and perhaps some of those could be the next Tuta and the next Signal.
Beyond that, what happened to Seth from Opt Out? He was so articulate and a key figure in my own privacy journey early on.
Also, some of the Pirate party representatives. There are a few well-known figures from the EU, but Pirate parties exist all over the world.
Finally, privacy voices that do not have ‘western’ world as their target. For example, there was a question about FOSS Muslim apps on this forum recently. There is so little of that type of discussion, but it could interest millions of people.
