EFF’s Cindy Cohn Is Stepping Down, and the Timing Couldn’t Be More Telling

Back in 2022, Cindy Cohn started writing her memoir, Privacy’s Defender. She worried people would see her as an “old fuddy duddy” still yelling about government spying online. That fear says a lot about how the conversation around digital rights has shifted over the past decade.

Cohn was one of the EFF’s first litigators, then its executive director for years. She saw firsthand how government surveillance became a core civil rights issue when the internet went mainstream in the 1990s. But by the early 2020s, public attention had mostly moved on. Big Tech harms—data brokers, algorithmic manipulation, ad targeting—took center stage. Government overreach felt like yesterday’s fight.

Then Trump’s second term started.

ICE operations went into overdrive, leaning heavily on technology to enable mass deportation. Flock cameras, license plate readers, social media monitoring—all the surveillance tools civil liberties groups warned about for decades became weapons in immigration enforcement. Communities pushed back, sometimes across political lines, tearing down cameras and organizing to protect neighbors from raids.

The Department of Homeland Security tried unmasking ICE critics on social media and mostly failed. But they tried. That’s the part that should worry everyone. EFF filed and backed lawsuits to protect the right to track ICE activity and share information anonymously. Cohn’s team has been fighting those battles while also wrestling with the broader question: how do you defend privacy when the government and tech companies are both using the same tools?

Cohn stepping down now isn’t a retreat. It’s a handoff. The next leader inherits a fight that’s bigger than it was in the 90s, more urgent than it was in 2022, and far more tangled. AI-powered surveillance, facial recognition at scale, automated deportation targeting—this isn’t theoretical anymore.

I’ve been watching EFF for years, and I’ll admit I sometimes wondered if they were still relevant in a world where everyone’s worried about ChatGPT stealing jobs. Turns out, the old battles never really went away. They just got dressed up in new tech.

Cohn’s memoir will hit shelves soon. I hope people read it. Not because she’s leaving, but because the history she lived through is repeating itself faster than most of us want to admit.