Who Defends Your Digital Rights? Meet EFF's Cindy Cohn
Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People
Guy Kawasaki
4.6 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Four years out of law school, and she's taking on the entire U.S. Department of Justice? Meet Cindy Cohn, the attorney who turned a Haight-Ashbury party connection into one of the most pivotal legal victories in internet history. As Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—the world's leading digital rights organization—Cindy commands a team of 125 lawyers, technologists, and activists fighting the surveillance state daily. She spills the brutal truth about encryption backdoors threatening global security, why the "nothing to hide" argument crumbles in 2025's political reality, and how well-intentioned laws become authoritarian weapons. From tactical Signal advice to border crossing strategies, Cindy shares the security practices she actually uses while exposing how the UK's encryption demands could destroy privacy worldwide. This conversation will shatter your assumptions about online privacy and arm you with the knowledge to fight back against the surveillance state while revealing EFF's urgent mission to reclaim our digital democracy.
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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 | If the police showed up at your front door and said, Guy, you know, we're really worried there's a lot of break-ins in the neighborhood. |
| 0:04.9 | So what we want you to do is to leave your back door open so that if the burglars break in, we can catch them easily because we don't want to have to bound down your front door in order to do it. |
| 0:13.8 | Like, you'd look at them and tell them they were crazy. And that's happening in the context of digital devices where it's a little more abstract and |
| 0:21.5 | they use language to obscure what they're doing. |
| 0:24.8 | Like this gets put forward as if it's, oh, law enforcement absolutely needs this. |
| 0:28.9 | It's crazy and it's bad for all of us. |
| 0:34.7 | Good morning, everyone. |
| 0:36.2 | It's Guy Kawasaki. |
| 0:42.6 | This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and we're on this mission to make you remarkable. |
| 0:50.4 | So we go all over the world looking for remarkable people, and we found one really close to us in San Francisco, California. |
| 0:57.2 | Her name is Cindy Cohn, and she's the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. |
| 1:04.6 | Wow. And in my humble opinion, that's probably the leading defender of civil liberties in the digital world. |
| 1:13.8 | She has led this great case of Bernstein v. Department of Justice, which established its software programming is protected speech under the First Amendment. |
| 1:17.5 | And the National Law Journal named her one of 100 most influential lawyers in America. |
| 1:24.9 | And I love this quote about Cindy, man. |
| 1:27.4 | I hope somebody says something like this about me someday. |
| 1:30.7 | The quote is, if Big Brother is watching, he better watch out for Cindy Cohn. |
| 1:37.5 | Oh my God, man. |
| 1:38.8 | I got to go back in your history. |
| 1:40.5 | I noticed something doing research about you. |
| 1:42.9 | So you got your law degree in |
| 1:45.4 | 1989 or 1990, right? Yes. And then in a mere four years, your lead counsel for Bernstein |
... |
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