Cohn, who helped lead a landmark crypto case and shape EFF’s agenda for decades, will hand leadership of the group to Nicole Ozer this summer.
They’re getting their ducks in a row for an upcoming changing of the guards at Electronic Frontier Foundation, as Cindy Cohn prepares to pass the executive director baton to Nicole Ozer. Cohn will be stepping down on June 1, after a career spanning more than 26 years at EFF, the last 11 as ED. The organization, a San Francisco-based international nonprofit digital rights group, announced on Tuesday that Ozer had been named by its board of directors as Cohn’s replacement.
In 2025, the board had formed a committee to search for Cohn’s successor, with assistance from leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates.
Ozer seems to be well suited for the position. She arrives after a seven-month stint as the inaugural ED for the Center for Constitutional Democracy, which is operated by the University of California, College of the Law, in San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). Before that, she spent more than 20 years at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California where she was the founding director of the organization’s Technology and Civil Liberties Program.
“Nicole Ozer is the ideal person to lead EFF during this unprecedented time in our nation’s history,” EFF’s chairperson, Gigi Sohn, said in a statement. “She possesses all of the qualities necessary to lead the organization: great vision, strong management skills and deep substantive knowledge. The fact that she has worked alongside EFF for over two decades is icing on the cake.”
According to LinkedIn, the outgoing ED first became associated with EFF in 1993, when she served as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a successful First Amendment challenge to US export restrictions on cryptography. Later, in 2000, she came onboard as legal director, and took the ED position in 2015.
It turns out that over time, she had opportunities to work with the person who would become her replacement.
“I couldn’t be happier to pass EFF’s reins over to Nicole,” Cohn said. “She has been our stalwart partner for many years in standing up for privacy, free speech, and innovation online. I’m confident that she understands both the strong heart and the future potential of EFF, especially as our work is more critical than ever.”
In addition to her brief time at the Center for Constitutional Democracy, Ozer is a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Previously, she was a 2024-2025 technology and human rights fellow with the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and in 2019 was a visiting researcher at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and a non-residential fellow with the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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