After 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn is stepping down as executive director. In a WIRED interview, she reflects on encryption, AI, and why she's not ready to quit the battle. After a quarter century defending digital rights, Cindy Cohn announced on Tuesday that she is stepping down as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cohn, who has led the San Francisco-based nonprofit since 2015, says she will leave the role later this year, concluding a chapter that helped define the modern fight over online freedom. Cohn first rose to prominence as lead counsel in, the 1990s case that overturned federal restrictions on publishing encryption code. As EFF's legal director and later executive director, she guided the group through legal challenges to government surveillance, reforms to computer crime laws, and efforts to hold corporations accountable for data collection. Over the past decade, EFF has expanded its influence, becoming a central force in shaping the debate over privacy, security, and digital freedom. In an interview with WIRED, Cohn reflected on EFF's foundational encryption victories, its unfinished battles against National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, and the organization's work protecting independent security researchers.

Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.

Grindr, the dating app that caters to gay men, cannot be held responsible for the rape of a 15-year-old boy who the company matched with sexual predators, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week; it is the latest teens-versus-tech spat in a fight over internet immunity experts say could soon come before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appellate court's ruling upheld a 2023 decision by U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II of the Central District of California, who dismissed the suit, saying Grindr was shielded by broad immunity protections passed almost a decade before the plaintiff was born. In a series of events Wright called "alarming and tragic," a closeted Nova Scotia teen downloaded the LGBTQ hookup app in an attempt to meet other gay kids in his rural Canadian town. Instead, over the course of four days, he was assaulted by four adult men, including a man who picked him up after the teen sent him pictures from his high school cafeteria. LGBTQ social networking platform Grindr last year told its all-remote staff they had to return to the office or lose their jobs.

Privacy experts are sounding the alarm on a new satellite capable of spying on your every move that is set to launch in 2025. The satellite, created by startup company Albedo, is so high quality it can zoom in on people or license plates from space, raising concerns among expert that it will create a'big brother is always watching' scenario. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy. Albedo signed two separate million-dollar contracts with the U.S. Air Force and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center to help the government monitor potential threats to U.S. national security. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy.

Much of humanity's future privacy is reliant on the promise, potential, and caveats of how we handle the power of AI in the coming years. AI is a powerhouse tool with immense potential to help humanity. As we activate and enable this tool in it's many forms, let's make sure that we protect our right to privacy, permission, bias-removal, and more. So… Is privacy still possible? How does "outside access" to your data, including criminal access, affect your world?

The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI reportedly told investors that it aims to collect 100 billion photos--supposedly enough to ensure that almost every human will be in its database. With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation." "It limits the uses of its system to agencies engaged in lawful investigative processes directed at criminal conduct, or at preventing specific, substantial, and imminent threats to people's lives or physical safety." A federal judge "rejected Clearview's First Amendment defense, denied the company's motion to dismiss, and allowed the lawsuits to move forward," the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote yesterday. A Vice report yesterday quoted Ton-That as saying that Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber have "expressed interest" in using Clearview facial recognition "for the purposes of consent-based identity verification, since there are a lot of issues with crimes that happen on their platforms."

Let's be honest, it's been a rough decade at this point, and things seem to be getting worse rather than better. Online radicalization has seen many of the world's political systems spin out of control to the point of uselessness. Climate change is a problem facing literally all of us that few in power seem interested in addressing. And our economic situation seems to be predicated on everyone buying lots of stuff all the time, despite the fact that most of the cost of living is swallowed up by housing. It's a lot, and things can feel generally very bleak right now.

Cory Doctorow, 49, is a British-Canadian blogger, science fiction author and tech activist. He has held various academic posts and is a visiting professor of the Open University. His latest novel, Attack Surface, was published earlier this month. The protagonist in your new novel tries to offset her job at a tech company where she is working for a repressive regime by helping some of its targets evade detection. Do you think many Silicon Valley employees feel uneasy about their work?

Amazon may have banned police from using its facial recognition technology, but a new report shows the tech giant is providing thousands of departments with video and audio footage from Ring. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with the Amazon-owned company and hundreds of them have'deadly histories.' Data from sources reveals half of the agencies had at least one fatal encounter in the last five years and altogether are responsible for a third of fatal encounters nationwide. These departments are also involved with the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Antonio Valenzuela, Michael Ramos and Sean Monterrosa. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties, found over 1,400 agencies are working with Amazon-owned Ring and hundreds of them have'deadly histories' DailyMail.com

Their lifeless eyes peer from building facades, lampposts and streetlight poles. They never sleep, never even blink. And now, enabled by advances in computing power and artificial intelligence, surveillance cameras can do more than just watch. They can recognize, and they can remember. The district attorney for Pennsylvania's second-most-populous county has assembled a network of advanced surveillance cameras in and around Pittsburgh and has enlisted colleagues in four surrounding counties to extend its reach into their jurisdictions.