EFF’s Leadership Handoff Comes at a Moment When Everyone Suddenly Cares About Surveillance Again

Back in 2022, when Cindy Cohn started writing her memoir Privacy’s Defender, she told me she worried people would see her as an “old fuddy duddy” still banging on about government spying. That’s the kind of self-deprecation you get from someone who’s been fighting the same fight for decades.

Cohn was one of EFF’s first litigators back when the internet was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and she’s been its executive director for long enough to watch the whole landscape shift. For years, the conversation around digital rights drifted away from government surveillance and settled squarely on Big Tech harms. Data brokers, ad tracking, algorithmic manipulation — that’s what got people riled up. Government overreach felt like a 90s problem.

Then Trump’s second term started, and suddenly everyone remembers what a surveillance state looks like.

ICE operations went into overdrive, and they leaned hard on technology to make mass deportation work. Flock cameras — those automated license plate readers that cities installed for “public safety” — became tools for tracking people’s movements and feeding arrest data back to federal agencies. Communities started tearing them down, sometimes with bipartisan support. That’s not something you see every day.

The Department of Homeland Security went after ICE critics on social media, trying to unmask anonymous accounts. They largely failed, but the fact that they tried at all sent a signal. EFF has been filing and backing lawsuits to protect people’s right to track ICE activity and share information without doxxing themselves. The old fight is new again.

So Cohn is stepping down as executive director, and the timing is interesting. She’s not leaving EFF entirely — she’ll stay on as a senior advisor — but handing the reins to someone else while the organization is neck-deep in litigation and public attention feels like a calculated move. Either that, or she’s just tired. I wouldn’t blame her.

The new leadership will inherit an organization that’s suddenly relevant in ways it hasn’t been since the Snowden leaks. The challenge isn’t just fighting ICE surveillance; it’s keeping the public engaged when the next news cycle inevitably moves on. Because it will. It always does.