Podcast appearances and mentions of nicole ozer

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for a wide-ranging conversation covering the EFF's origins and mission, the countercultural roots of Silicon Valley, the rise of surveillance-based business models, the challenges facing open source software and open-weight AI models, the legal landscape around intellectual property and privacy law, and the growing tension between government overreach and civil liberties in the digital age. Cindy also discusses her upcoming departure from EFF after 26 years, the transition to new leadership, and her recently published book Privacy's Defender, which chronicles key legal battles she fought to protect digital privacy rights.Links mentioned:- EFF website: eff.org- Privacy's Defender book: eff.org/privacysdefenderTimestamps00:00 - Stewart introduces Cindy Cohn, EFF Executive Director, who explains the organization's mission protecting digital rights since 1990.05:00 - Cindy connects counterculture roots to early internet idealism, describing how digital communication broke down physical barriers for organizing.10:00 - Cindy reveals surveillance becoming the dominant business model surprised her, blaming corporate consolidation over naive techno-optimism.15:00 - Discussion shifts to Silicon Valley's military contractor substrate and how corporate money co-opted hacker ethos.20:00 - Open source community faces existential threat from age verification legislation while open-weight AI models emerge as critical alternative.25:00 - Cindy outlines legal frameworks like compulsory licensing and easements that could democratize access to foundational AI models.30:00 - Privacy principles around secondary data use identified as core surveillance problem, with Anthropic's domestic surveillance red line praised.35:00 - Cloud Act, Five Eyes surveillance networks, and global jurisdictional complexity examined through individual threat modeling lens.40:00 - Constitutional rights and democratic participation framed as irreplaceable bulwarks against authoritarian surveillance tendencies.45:00 - Cindy announces departure from EFF after 26 years, naming successor Nicole Ozer while planning return to courtroom litigation.Key Insights1. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in 1990, before the World Wide Web existed, by Mitch Kapoor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore, with early support from Steve Wozniak. Its core mission is to ensure that civil rights and freedoms follow people into the digital world, using lawyers, technologists, and activists to keep the internet on the side of users.2. The early countercultural movement of the 1960s and 70s heavily influenced the founders of the internet and EFF. Figures like Barlow believed the digital world could reduce physical barriers like race, class, and geography, allowing people to be judged by the quality of their ideas rather than the circumstances of their birth.3. The dominant surveillance business model that emerged was not inevitable. Cohn argues it resulted from deliberate policy failures, particularly the abandonment of competition law, which allowed a handful of companies to consolidate control over the entire internet and adopt 360-degree data collection as their primary revenue strategy.4. Open source communities remain active and vital but are under serious threat from legislation like age verification laws that make it practically impossible to maintain fully open tools. Cohn sees this community as essential to reclaiming public control over computation, especially in the age of AI.5. The open weights question for AI models is fundamentally different from traditional open source software because of the enormous capital required to train foundation models. Cohn suggests legal mechanisms like compulsory licensing, similar to how cover songs work in copyright law, as one possible path toward broader public access.6. A core privacy principle Cohn advocates is that data collected for one purpose must not be used for others. This single rule, if enforced, would begin dismantling the infrastructure that enables mass individual surveillance, including the AI-powered profiling she sees as the next dangerous frontier.7. Cohn is stepping down from EFF after 26 years to allow new leadership and return to litigation, which is where she believes her impact is greatest. She also wrote a book called Privacy's Defender to preserve the history of digital rights fights from the 1990s onward and to help people understand how current threats emerged so they can work to reverse them.

In high school and college, Nicole swam,That was all before she knew that privacy was her jam!Nicole was in the pilot program at AmeriCorps,At the ACLU, she served as the Tech and Civil Liberties Director!

Nicole Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties director for the ACLU of California, has been at the forefront of debates around privacy and technology for more than 15 years. She joins At Liberty to break down the current state of facial recognition technology and why it raises civil rights and civil liberties concerns.

Panel — Surveillance on the Silver Screen- Fact or Fiction? Nicole Ozer Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of California Kevin Bankston Policy Director, New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute Timothy Edgar Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University Join ACLU and others for a fun-filled surveillance tour of the movies - from Brazil to Bourne - to talk about what is still fiction and what is now fact. What is technologically possible? What is legal? And what is happening in the courts, Congress, and in companies and communities to reset the balance between government surveillance and individual liberties. Kevin Bankston is the Policy Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, where he works in the public interest to promote policy and regulatory reforms to strengthen communities by supporting open communications networks, platforms, and technologies, with a focus on issues of Internet surveillance and censorship. Prior to leading OTI's policy team, Kevin was a Senior Counsel and the Director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. From that position, he spent two years advocating on a wide range of Internet and technology policy issues both international and domestic, most recently organizing a broad coalition of companies and civil society organizations to demand greater transparency around the US government's surveillance practices. Prior to joining CDT, he worked for nearly a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in free speech and privacy law with a focus on government surveillance, Internet privacy, and location privacy. As a Senior Staff Attorney at EFF, he regularly litigated issues surrounding free expression and electronic surveillance, and was a lead counsel in EFF's lawsuits against the National Security Agency and AT&T, challenging the legality of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program first revealed in 2005. He received his JD at the University of Southern California Law School after receiving his BA at the University of Texas at Austin. Timothy H. Edgar is a visiting fellow at the Institute and adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. His work focuses on the unique policy challenges posed by growing global cyber conflict, particularly in reconciling security interests with fundamental values, including privacy and Internet freedom. Mr. Edgar served under President Obama as the first director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House National Security Staff, focusing on cybersecurity, open government, and data privacy initiatives. From 2006 to 2009, he was the first deputy for civil liberties for the director of national intelligence, reviewing new surveillance authorities, the terrorist watchlist, and other sensitive programs. He has also been counsel for the information sharing environment, which facilitates the secure sharing of terrorism-related information. He has a JD from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review, and an AB from Dartmouth College. Nicole Ozer developed and has led the technology and civil liberties work for the ACLU in California since 2004. Nicole is a nationally recognized expert on issues at the intersection of consumer privacy and government surveillance and free speech and the Internet. Nicole developed Demand Your dotRights, ACLU's national online privacy campaign and spearheaded the passage of both the first RFID and digital book privacy laws in the nation. Nicole is the author of numerous legal and policy publications, including Losing the Spotlight: A Study of California's Shine the Light Law, Privacy & Free Speech: It's Good for Business, a primer of dozens of case studies and tips for baking safeguards into the business development process. Her most recent law review article, Putting Online Privacy Above the Fold: Building a Social Movement and Creating Corporate Change, was published by the NYU Review Law & Social Change in 2012. Nicole graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College, studied comparative civil rights history at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and earned her J.D. with a Certificate in Law and Technology from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California Berkeley. Nicole blogs at www.aclunc.org/tech and tweets @nicoleozer.

A timely and engaging conversation with Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director at the ACLU of Northern California. We will be exploring the latest updates related to NSA spying — what we now know, what we still don’t know, and opportunities in Congress, the courts, companies, and in communities to rein in warrantless surveillance and better safeguard privacy and free speech.

LAS VEGAS- The (r)evolution of privacy in technology was tweeted tonight at the Develop 4 Privacy awards at the DEFCON 19 hacker conference in Las Vegas. 3rd Place went to Obscuracam (Guardian Project), 2nd place to tiqr (https://tiqr.org/), an open source authenticator, and the 1st prize award to Gibberbot (Guardian Project). The winning applications were developed using the principles of Privacy by Design. One of the winning developers, Harlo Holmes, Guardian Project's mobile app developer for the Android platform, spoke with us about Obscuracam, Gibberbot and her DEFCON experience. Holmes, a Facebook early adopter, talks about what the winning apps do to protect privacy, social networks and the societal goals at the Guardian Project. Privacy by Design policies and best practices are fast becoming the most resilient way to reinforce privacy values for technologies in the marketplace. "The Develop for Privacy challenge is a great way to raise awareness for principles of privacy by design at a developer and code level. Far too many developers think about putting their user in control of their data after the fact. By encouraging privacy from the start, we're raising awareness of how to design for privacy," said Andrew Lewman of the Tor Project. Contestants' apps were judged based on effectiveness, the quality of user documentation, source code, originality, portability, and performance. The DEFCON event judges were veteran privacy scholars and analysts who awarded priority to the protection of daily online chats & instant messaging and the first place win to Gibberbot. “This app demonstrates that advances in consumer technology don’t need to come at the expense of privacy, said Nicole Ozer, with event sponsor, ACLU of Northern California and the Demand Your dotRights campaign. “We’re hopeful that companies will start to bake in better privacy protections so that users don’t have to choose between using smartphones and keeping control of their private information.” Winning developers won't walk away with a lot of prizes, but their technologies will be among the most recognised and supported examples of Privacy by Design in the industry. In fact, their apps will an open source download for most users. Harlo Holmes, who was given a jacket by presenters, described her win for privacy as,"priceless".