EFF Leadership Change Comes at a Crucial Time for Digital Rights

Cindy Cohn, the longtime executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is stepping down. The timing couldn’t be more interesting.

Back in 2022, when Cohn started writing her memoir Privacy’s Defender, she worried people would see her as an “old fuddy duddy” still banging on about government spying. That concern says a lot about how the digital rights conversation has shifted over the past decade.

Cohn was one of EFF’s first litigators and later led the organization through some of its most significant battles. She’s been around long enough to remember when government surveillance was the primary concern for civil rights advocates on the internet. That was the 1990s. The world was simpler then.

But here’s the thing: attention has moved on. For years now, Big Tech harms have dominated the conversation. Privacy violations by corporations, algorithmic bias, data harvesting — that’s where the public outrage has been focused. Government overreach felt like a relic of the post-9/11 era.

Then Trump’s second term hit, and everything changed again.

ICE operations have ramped up nationwide, and they’re leaning hard on technology to support mass deportation goals. We’re talking about license plate readers, social media monitoring, facial recognition at airports — the whole surveillance playbook. Communities have responded by tearing down Flock cameras, of all things. People who disagree on just about everything else are finding common ground on this one: they don’t want their movements tracked and used for arrests.

The Department of Homeland Security has been trying to unmask ICE critics on social media. They’ve largely failed so far, but the attempts are worrying. EFF has been filing and backing lawsuits to protect Americans’ rights to track ICE activity and share information anonymously. This is the kind of work that made EFF what it is.

So Cohn is handing over the reins at a moment when government surveillance is back in the spotlight, but the landscape is more complicated than it was in the 90s. Now you’ve got government overreach and corporate surveillance happening simultaneously, often in coordination. The lines are blurrier.

Whoever takes over will have to navigate a world where EFF’s original mission — defending against government spying — is suddenly urgent again, but the threats are more diffuse. Big Tech isn’t going to regulate itself, and the government isn’t going to stop asking for backdoors. The new leader will need to fight on both fronts without losing focus.

Cohn’s memoir might end up being more timely than she expected. The old battles are coming back, just dressed in new clothes.