How Privacy’s Defender Cindy Cohn Changed the Future of Encryption
Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People
Guy Kawasaki
4.5 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cindy Cohn joins Remarkable People to break down encryption, Section 230, metadata, and the real meaning of the First and Fourth Amendments in the digital age. As longtime leader of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, she has taken on the Department of Justice, challenged mass surveillance, and helped secure the tools we rely on every day.
We also dive into her new memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, and what comes next in the fight for online freedom.
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Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. It's Guy Kawasaki. I believe we are in troubling and dangerous times. |
| 0:08.2 | One of the things that's happening is that privacy is eroding. And when privacy erodes, so does |
| 0:15.0 | democracy. So Maddoz and Nizmer and I, we just finished the book. It's called Everybody Has Something to Hide. |
| 0:24.0 | This is a jargon-free book. It is for everybody to learn why and how they should use signal. |
| 0:32.0 | They should use signal to ensure their privacy, safety, and well-being. |
| 0:36.2 | It comes out on January 28th for five days. |
| 0:40.1 | It'll be free. And then it'll go to $4.4. I hope you see what we did there. The forward is from |
| 0:47.9 | Congressman Rokana because he believes, like we do, that democracy is extremely important. |
| 0:56.9 | And Signal is one of the tools that can help us preserve democracy. |
| 1:01.3 | So remember the name. |
| 1:03.1 | Everybody has something to hide. |
| 1:05.8 | It's by Guy Kawasaki and Madison Nyzmer. |
| 1:10.1 | Most of us are pretty trackable with just three or four pieces of |
| 1:13.6 | metadata about us. And again, it doesn't just implement you. It can implement all the people you |
| 1:18.4 | talk to. And one of the things I try to talk to people about privacy is that even if you think you |
| 1:22.7 | don't have any need for privacy, I suspect you know somebody who does, whether that somebody doesn't have papers |
| 1:28.7 | or even has papers, but ends up a target in this country right now. Lots and lots of people who have |
| 1:34.3 | legitimate asylum claims or green cards or other things are finding themselves swept up in these |
| 1:38.9 | kinds of things. If they're a protester, if they're an activist, if they're just somebody that |
| 1:43.6 | the government doesn't like. |
| 1:45.2 | We have a, you know, all of this stuff, you are very findable, trackable, |
| 1:48.7 | and the people that you communicate with and associate with are trackable as well, just from your metadata. |
... |
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