Privacy’s Defenders Podcast: Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries
A podcast episode featuring Cindy Cohn, following her 26-year tenure at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, traces the history of digital privacy activism — from early internet cypherpunks to today's battles against license plate readers, facial recognition, and behavioral advertising.
Why this matters: The surveillance Cohn spent decades fighting is now ordinary infrastructure. Flock cameras log where your car goes. Face recognition identifies you in public spaces. Ad systems build profiles from your browsing and location. None of this was inevitable. People made choices to build it this way, and other people fought hard to stop it. That fight is still going. Knowing that history matters, because it names who is responsible and shows that the outcome is not fixed.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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