How to Fix the Internet

People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that – based on what we see and do online – seem to know everything we’re thinking and planning. It didn’t have to be this way, and since the early days of the internet, a dedicated band of activists, lawyers and technologists have fought for a better, more secure and private digital future – a future that’s still attainable.  

Cindy Cohn, who just finished a 26-year run with the Electronic Frontier Foundation including 11 years as its executive director, has lived this fight. She says privacy isn’t just about secrecy: It's ultimately about power – who has it, and who has the ability to protect themselves from it.   

Welcome to the first episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was. 

In this episode, Cindy talks with EFF cofounder John Gilmore about how he – an early employee at Sun Microsystems – came together with Lotus Development cofounder Mitch Kapor and cattle rancher, philosopher and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow to create EFF as a bulwark against government investigation and prosecution of early internet users.  

It’s a story of the Secret Service’s “Operation Sundevil,” jet-setting tech titans, tie-dyed cypherpunks, and a fateful house party in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district amid the earliest days of online communications, setting the stage for the battles that created the internet as we know it and issues we still grapple with today. 

The “Privacy’s Defenders” podcast is a follow-up to Cindy’s book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance,” bringing to life pivotal moments in the voices of those who fought for your rights. Sales of “Privacy’s Defender” benefit EFF, so pick up your copy today! 

While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from earlier this week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” (MIT Press).

Part memoir, part battle cry, “Privacy’s Defender” is the story of Cindy’s fights alongside the visionaries who looked at the early internet and understood that the legal and political battles over this new technology - the Crypto Wars, the NSA’s dragnet, the FBI gag orders - were really over the future of free speech, privacy, and power for all.

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, March 10 in front of a packed house at San Francisco’s iconic City Lights Bookstore. You can also watch the video on YouTube.

For more about the book and Cindy’s national book tour - with stops in places including Seattle, Silicon Valley, Denver, Boston, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Washington DC and New York City - check out https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender

And finally, stay tuned to this feed; we’re working on a special podcast series featuring key players and moments from the book!

A new podcast from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The digital world isn't just a place you visit on your phone. It's the battleground where tomorrow's civil liberties will be won—or lost. Each episode of the EFFector podcast will fill you in on the most important news in digital rights, highlighting key developments in the fight for a world where technology supports freedom, not tyranny.

All this season, “How to Fix the Internet” has been focusing on the tools and technology of freedom – and one of the most important tools of freedom is a library. Access to knowledge not only creates an informed populace that democracy requires, but also gives people the tools they need to thrive. And the internet has radically expanded access to knowledge in ways that earlier generations could only have dreamed of – so long as that knowledge is allowed to flow freely.

(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.) 

A passionate advocate for public internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his life intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, government information, and software of our cultural heritage – and works with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library that’s accessible to all. The Archive is known for the Wayback Machine, which lets users search the history of almost one trillion web pages. But it also archives images, software, video and audio recordings, documents, and it contains dozens of resources and projects that fill a variety of gaps in cultural, political, and historical knowledge. Kahle joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how the free flow of knowledge makes all of us more free. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• The role AI plays in digitizing, preserving, and easing access to all kinds of information 
• How EFF helped the Internet Archive fight off the government’s demand for information about library patrons 
• The importance of building a decentralized, distributed web to finding and preserving information for all 
• Why building revolutionary, world-class libraries like the Internet Archive requires not only money and technology, but also people willing to dedicate their lives to the work 
• How nonprofits are crucial to filling societal gaps left by businesses, governments, and academia 

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, which serves millions of people each day and is among the world’s largest libraries. After studying AI at and graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, Kahle helped launch the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, he helped create the internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS); WAIS Inc. was later sold to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. He is a former member of EFF’s Board of Directors. 

The human brain might be the grandest computer of all, but in this episode, we talk to two experts who confirm that the ability for tech to decipher thoughts, and perhaps even manipulate them, isn't just around the corner – it's already here. Rapidly advancing "neurotechnology" could offer new ways for people with brain trauma or degenerative diseases to communicate, as the New York Times reported this month, but it also could open the door to abusing the privacy of the most personal data of all: our thoughts. Worse yet, it could allow manipulating how people perceive and process reality, as well as their responses to it – a Pandora’s box of epic proportions. 

(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.) 

Neuroscientist Rafael Yuste and human rights lawyer Jared Genser are awestruck by both the possibilities and the dangers of neurotechnology. Together they established The Neurorights Foundation, and now they join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how technology is advancing our understanding of what it means to be human, and the solid legal guardrails they're building to protect the privacy of the mind. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• How to protect people’s mental privacy, agency, and identity while ensuring equal access to the positive aspects of brain augmentation 
• Why neurotechnology regulation needs to be grounded in international human rights 
• Navigating the complex differences between medical and consumer privacy laws 
• The risk that information collected by devices now on the market could be decoded into actual words within just a few years 
• Balancing beneficial innovation with the protection of people’s mental privacy 

Rafael Yuste is a professor of biological sciences and neuroscience, co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, and director of the NeuroTechnology Center at Columbia University. He led the group of researchers that first proposed the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative launched in 2013 by the Obama Administration. 

Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer who serves as managing director at Perseus Strategies, renowned for his successes in freeing political prisoners around the world. He’s also the Senior Tech Fellow at Harvard University’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Right, and he is outside general counsel to The Neurorights Foundation, an international advocacy group he co-founded with Yuste that works to enshrine human rights as a crucial part of the development of neurotechnology. 

If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the world and exterminate humanity. That’s a pretty wide spectrum, and leaves a lot of people very confused about what exactly AI can and can’t do. In this episode, we’ll help you sort that out: For example, we’ll talk about why even superintelligent AI cannot simply replace humans for most of what we do, nor can it perfect or ruin our world unless we let it.

Arvind Narayanan studies the societal impact of digital technologies with a focus on how AI does and doesn’t work, and what it can and can’t do. He believes that if we set aside all the hype, and set the right guardrails around AI’s training and use, it has the potential to be a profoundly empowering and liberating technology. Narayanan joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how we get to a world in which AI can improve aspects of our lives from education to transportation—if we make some system improvements first—and how AI will likely work in ways that we barely notice but that help us grow and thrive. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• What it means to be a “techno-optimist” (and NOT the venture capitalist kind) 
• Why we can’t rely on predictive algorithms to make decisions in criminal justice, hiring, lending, and other crucial aspects of people’s lives 
• How large-scale, long-term, controlled studies are needed to determine whether a specific AI application actually lives up to its accuracy promises 
• Why “cheapfakes” tend to be more (or just as) effective than deepfakes in shoring up political support 
• How AI is and isn’t akin to the Industrial Revolution, the advent of electricity, and the development of the assembly line 

Arvind Narayanan is professor of computer science and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Along with Sayash Kapoor, he publishes the AI Snake Oil newsletter, followed by tens of thousands of researchers, policy makers, journalists, and AI enthusiasts; they also have authored “AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference” (2024, Princeton University Press). He has studied algorithmic amplification on social media as a visiting senior researcher at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute; co-authored an online a textbook on fairness and machine learning; and led Princeton's Web Transparency and Accountability Project, uncovering how companies collect and use our personal information. 

Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more. 

Kara Swisher has been documenting the internet’s titans for almost 30 years through a variety of media outlets and podcasts. She believes that with adequate regulation we can keep people safe online without stifling innovation, and we can have an internet that’s transparent and beneficial for all, not just a collection of fiefdoms run by a handful of homogenous oligarchs. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• Why it’s so important that tech workers speak out about issues they want to improve and work to create companies that elevate best practices  
• Why completely unconstrained capitalism turns technology into weapons instead of tools 
• How antitrust legislation and enforcement can create a healthier online ecosystem 
• Why AI could either bring abundance for many or make the very rich even richer 
• The small online media outlets still doing groundbreaking independent reporting that challenges the tech oligarchy 

Kara Swisher is one of the world's foremost tech journalists and critics, and currently hosts two podcasts: On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, the latter co-hosted by New York University Professor Scott Galloway.  She's been covering the tech industry since the 1990s for outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times; she is an New York Magazine editor-at-large, a CNN contributor, and cofounder of the tech news sites Recode and All Things Digital. She also has authored several books, including “Burn Book” (Simon & Schuster, 2024) in which she documents the history of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires who run it. 

Many people approach digital security training with furrowed brows, as an obstacle to overcome. But what if learning to keep your tech safe and secure was consistently playful and fun? People react better to learning, and retain more knowledge, when they're having a good time. It doesn’t mean the topic isn’t serious – it’s just about intentionally approaching a serious topic with joy. 

That’s how Helen Andromedon approaches her work as a digital security trainer in East Africa. She teaches human rights defenders how to protect themselves online, creating open and welcoming spaces for activists, journalists, and others at risk to ask hard questions and learn how to protect themselves against online threats. She joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss making digital security less complicated, more relevant, and more joyful to real users, and encouraging all women and girls to take online safety into their own hands so that they can feel fully present and invested in the digital world. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• How the Trump Administration’s shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has led to funding cuts for digital security programs in Africa and around the world, and why she’s still optimistic about the work 
• The importance of helping women feel safe and confident about using online platforms to create positive change in their communities and countries 
• Cultivating a mentorship model in digital security training and other training environments 
• Why diverse input creates training models that are accessible to a wider audience 
• How one size never fits all in digital security solutions, and how Dungeons and Dragons offers lessons to help people retain what they learn 

Helen Andromedon – a moniker she uses to protect her own security – is a digital security trainer in East Africa who helps human rights defenders learn how to protect themselves and their data online and on their devices. She played a key role in developing the Safe Sisters project, which is a digital security training program for women. She’s also a UX researcher and educator who has worked as a consultant for many organizations across Africa, including the Association for Progressive Communications and the African Women’s Development Fund. 

The cryptography that protects our privacy and security online relies on the fact that even the strongest computers will take essentially forever to do certain tasks, like factoring prime numbers and finding discrete logarithms which are important for RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, and elliptic curve encryption. But what happens when those problems – and the cryptography they underpin – are no longer infeasible for computers to solve? Will our online defenses collapse? 

Not if Deirdre Connolly can help it. As a cutting-edge thinker in post-quantum cryptography, Connolly is making sure that the next giant leap forward in computing – quantum machines that use principles of subatomic mechanics to ignore some constraints of classical mathematics and solve complex problems much faster – don’t reduce our digital walls to rubble. Connolly joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss not only how post-quantum cryptography can shore up those existing walls but also help us find entirely new methods of protecting our information. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• Why we’re not yet sure exactly what quantum computing can do yet, and that’s exactly why we need to think about post-quantum cryptography now 
• What a “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attack is, and what’s happening today to defend against it
• How cryptographic collaboration, competition, and community are key to exploring a variety of paths to post-quantum resilience
• Why preparing for post-quantum cryptography is and isn’t like fixing the Y2K bug
• How the best impact that end users can hope for from post-quantum cryptography is no visible impact at all
• Don’t worry—you won’t have to know, or learn, any math for this episode!  

Deidre Connolly is a research and applied cryptographer at Sandbox AQ with particular expertise in post quantum encryption. She also co-hosts the “Security Cryptography Whatever” podcast about modern computer security and cryptography, with a focus on engineering and real-world experiences. Earlier, she was an engineer at the Zcash Foundation – a nonprofit that builds financial privacy infrastructure for the public good – as well as at Brightcove, Akamai, and HubSpot. 

Public-interest journalism speaks truth to power, so protecting press freedom is part of protecting democracy. But what does it take to digitally secure journalists’ work in an environment where critics, hackers, oppressive regimes, and others seem to have the free press in their crosshairs? 

That’s what Harlo Holmes focuses on as Freedom of the Press Foundation’s digital security director. Her team provides training, consulting, security audits, and other support to newsrooms, independent journalists, freelancers, documentary filmmakers – anyone who is making independent journalism in the public interest – so that they can do their jobs more safely and securely. Holmes joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss the tools and techniques that help journalists protect themselves and their sources while keeping the world informed.  

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• The importance of protecting online anonymity on an ever-increasingly “data-greedy” internet. 
• How digital security nihilism in the United States compares with regions of the world where oppressive and repressive governance are more common 
• Why compartmentalization can be a simple, easy approach to digital security 
• The need for middleware to provide encryption and other protections that shield sources’ anonymity and journalists’ work product when using corporate data platforms 
• How podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers fit into the broad sweep of media history, and need digital protections as well 

Harlo Holmes is the chief information security officer and director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. Holmes was a regular contributor to the open-source mobile security collective Guardian Project, where she spearheaded the media metadata verification initiative currently empowering ProofMode, Save by OpenArchive, eyeWitness to Atrocities, and others.