EFF’s Cindy Cohn Steps Down as AI and ICE Battles Heat Up

Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started writing her memoir back in 2022. She worried people would think she was an “old fuddy duddy” still yelling about government surveillance online. Turns out, her timing was pretty good.

Cohn was one of EFF’s first litigators and then ran the place for years. She watched government surveillance become the original civil rights nightmare of the mainstream internet in the 1990s. But somewhere along the way, everyone stopped caring about Uncle Sam reading your email and started obsessing over whether Meta was selling your data to advertisers. Cohn herself said attention had pivoted hard away from government abuses toward Big Tech harms.

Then Trump’s second term kicked off. ICE operations went into overdrive, leaning hard on technology to power mass deportation efforts. Suddenly, online privacy wasn’t some abstract concern from the 90s. Communities started ripping down Flock cameras—those license plate readers that help cops make arrests—and people who’d never agree on anything politically found common ground in hating surveillance tech.

More worrying: the Department of Homeland Security tried to unmask ICE critics on social media. They mostly failed, but EFF has been filing and backing lawsuits to protect the right to track ICE activity and share info anonymously. The fight has come full circle.

So Cohn is stepping down. She’s been at this for decades, and the threats are evolving faster than ever—AI-powered surveillance, facial recognition at airports, data brokers selling location info to immigration enforcement. The new leader will have their hands full. But at least Cohn’s memoir won’t be a historical curiosity. It’ll be a playbook.