8 minute read
Interview - Electronic Frontier Foundation
SAFEGUARDING THE INTERNET
By Beth Cope
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Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Cindy Cohn, Executive Director at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, about their national and international work, protecting user freedoms on the internet, and preparing for the future in light of new legislation and the COVID-19 crisis.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
is a San Francisco-based non-profit organization advocating for the civil liberties of internet users. Founded in 1990 in reaction to heavy-handed law enforcement interventions against early adopters of the internet, the EFF now has a staff of over 100 people, including technologists, lawyers, and activists, and the support in place for them.
“I joined in the 2000s,” says Cindy Cohn, Executive Director at the EFF. “At the time, I was involved in freeing-up encryption technology from government control. A lot of the work we did back then was explaining to people what the future would look like when everybody had this technology in their homes and hands all the time. Of course, we’re living in that world right now. The forces that have pushed away from freedom, away from justice, away from innovation, have evolved and become stronger over the years.”
NATIONAL TO INTERNATIONAL
The EFF has grown up alongside the internet. “For historical, geographical reasons, the government of the United States had a huge voice in how the internet developed,” explains Ms. Cohn. “That’s changed now. I would say the EU has a bigger role in thinking innovatively about the future than the US government does. One of the great benefits of the early internet was that it allowed people to have a space to speak free of the government’s control. Now we’re seeing, whether it’s in Australia or Turkey or China,
governments are showing a lot more interest in their ability to control what happens on the internet.”
Today, the EFF continues to draw attention to the use of surveillance techniques by local, national, and international governments around the world. “In the U.S., we’re working on a wide variety of projects, from the national to the hyper-local,” says Ms. Cohn. “This ranges from collaborating with groups to get bans on police-use of facial recognition, or trying to stop the NSA from tapping into the internet backbone and spying on everybody, or, on the local level, cameras being placed in business districts across the United States, networked and made available to cops to carry out mass surveillance of us when we’re engaging in protest activity, which is protected activity. We work to support strong laws that let you take control of your own privacy, and get accountability when that is violated.”
INNOVATIVE FREEDOM
The EFF works with groups around the world who are trying to get their voice heard online. “We continue to navigate censorship schemes whether they’re governmental or ordinary people subject to the content moderation policies of these tech giants,” says Ms. Cohn. “We hear a lot about the powerful people who have been subject to those policies, but that’s actually the tinier piece. This is especially important in the global context. Whether we’re talking about the situation in Crimea involving Ukraine versus Russia, about Palestinian voices or Israeli voices in that conflict, or the opposition voices in Hong Kong, the need of the digital network to serve freedom of expression is as strong now as it was when started in 1990, but now we also have to consider the role the tech giants play in that.”
Today, five large companies that control the vast majority of the internet. “We’ve spent a lot of time really honing in on how we got here,” says Ms. Cohn. “The internet in the 1990s was a very distributed system, and we would talk about how important it was that there were low barriers for entry so that anybody who had a good idea could roll it out and make it available to the world. That’s not the world anymore. We’ve got these five big companies: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. There are American and international laws which have been unwittingly used to box out new competitors, block interoperability – what we call competitive compatibility – and systems that shift your mode of platforms to control everything that happens on said platform.”
A SUSTAINABLE INTERNET
For the EFF, a sustainable digital world requires a human-rights based approach. “The internet right now isn’t sustainable for the humans on it,” says Ms. Cohn. “It’s
a world in which we are constantly tracked. There are machine-learning tools that limit what we see and do, and where we can go based upon non-transparent decision making. We’ve seen this in the context of facial recognition – technologies that reinforce racism, sexism, and all of the things in our society which we should be combating. We stand up for privacy, free expression, and innovation, to help build a digital world that serves and empowers all. I believe that fits into an overall story of sustainability. I know that as much as people are nervous about the digital world right now, we are increasingly beholden to it. ”
A re-envisioned internet is one where the user would have choices and power. “You would have a baseline understanding of what the deal is with the services that you use, and there would be a floor which you can’t go below,” explains Ms. Cohn. “Our privacy needs to be protected in the same way you can’t sell yourself into slavery: there are limits to what we allow people to contract themselves into, we need real accountability. From a creative perspective, if you had a good idea you could roll it out, you wouldn’t have to bend the knee to Google or Amazon for instance, to make sure your service shows up in search results. If the police wanted to buy a new tool, they would have to go in front of the City Council locally and present the tool’s use and technology transparently to then get approval from the elected representatives. I think many people around the world think that’s how it works now, but it’s not. In America especially, we’ve got local cops with weapons we can see, crazy-big tanks, et cetera, but lots of surveillance equipment has been acquired without our approval, knowledge, and certainly without our control. We can flip those all around.”
KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL
The EFF has recently been focusing on providing California with broadband, the most populated US state, with one sixth of the country’s population. “The Biden infrastructure plan, and COVID also, has allowed us to help get broadband to more people,” explains Ms. Cohn. “Getting that into the legislation is important, but we must make sure that they don’t get co-opted by the big companies, and really do provide broadband for all. I think we’ve all learned during the COVID-19 crisis that we don’t have enough cheap and readily available broadband. In the U.S. we had these companies that would hand out hotspots to kids, as if a hotspot was a substitute for actual broadband that you could hold a Zoom call on. So we’re part of a huge coalition to make sure that everybody has access to real broadband options. We’re starting in the U.S., but the goal is to give everyone around the world broadband.”
In collaboration with a group of students at the University of Nevada, the EFF has mapped out all surveillance technology that has been acquired by law enforcement across the US. “It’s called the ‘Atlas of Surveillance’, so you can see what kinds of technologies your local government has,” explains Ms. Cohn. “All around the world there should be an easy-to-navigate website where you find out what technologies your cops have. One of our projects that went international was called ‘Who Has Your Back?’, where we asked tech companies about their processes for handing over your information to law enforcement. Often these ideas get picked up internation-
ally by other people, from seeing our work and being inspired to implement it in their area. We’re then able to serve as technical assistants in that process. The ‘Atlas of Surveillance’ ought to spread beyond the United States. Understanding what your government is up to is the first step, having local control over it is the second step, and these are keystones to democracy.”
“Our goal for the organization is to always be there to count on,” says Ms. Cohn. “We are the people who are working to make the world better in the future. We jokingly get called ‘the 911 of the internet’. That’s not quite right, but it is true that our job is to be on patrol for situations where we can apply pressure and make change. That’s what we are continuing to work towards. We recognize that the internet is the largest and most important it’s ever been. The COVID-19 crisis really brought that home to people, so we want to use this moment to set us up for a better future.” c
