EFF Gets a New Leader Just as the Fight Over AI and ICE Surveillance Heats Up

Cindy Cohn, the longtime executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is handing over the reins. She started writing her memoir back in 2022—tentatively titled Privacy’s Defender—and worried people would see her as an “old fuddy duddy” still banging on about government spying. Turns out, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Cohn was one of EFF’s first litigators back when the internet was still finding its feet in the 1990s. She watched government surveillance become the defining civil rights issue of the early web. Then, for a while, the spotlight shifted. Big Tech abuses—data harvesting, algorithmic bias, monopoly power—took center stage. The old worries about the feds snooping on your traffic started to feel almost quaint.

But then Trump’s second term kicked off, and ICE went into overdrive. Mass deportation operations depend heavily on technology: license plate readers, social media monitoring, facial recognition at airports. Suddenly, online privacy isn’t a niche concern anymore. Communities are tearing down Flock cameras. People who disagree on everything else are banding together to block surveillance tools that aid arrests.

The Department of Homeland Security has been trying to unmask ICE critics on social media—and mostly failing. EFF has been right there, filing lawsuits to protect the right to track ICE activity and share information anonymously. This is the environment Cohn’s successor is walking into: AI-powered policing, real-time location tracking, and a federal government that’s openly hostile to digital privacy.

I’ve been following EFF’s work for years, and I’ll admit I was skeptical when they first started shifting resources toward Big Tech. It felt like a distraction from the core mission. But the last few months have proven that government surveillance never went away—it just got better at hiding. The Flock camera backlash alone shows how quickly people wake up when the threat is local and visible.

Cohn leaves behind an organization that’s more relevant than it’s been in a decade. The new leader has a full plate: AI regulation, ICE tech abuse, data broker laws, and the ongoing fight to keep encryption intact. No pressure.

Whoever takes over, they’d better be ready for a fight. The old fuddy duddy concerns are back, and they’re not going anywhere.