After more than a quarter century at the helm of key digital rights battles, Cindy Cohn hands leadership to veteran ally Nicole Ozer while plotting a return to the courtroom.
It’s out with the old and in with the new at Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital civil-liberties group that focuses on online privacy and other human rights issues. In a move that was announced in March, Nicole Ozer today took over as EFF’s executive director. She replaces Cindy Cohn, who’s been with the organization for more than 25 years, and executive director since 2015.
Ozer seems to be well suited for the job. She spent more than 20 years as the founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the ACLU of Northern California, and for the last 11 months has been the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the University of California College of Law in San Francisco.
Meet Nicole Ozer
She also has a long history of working with EFF on projects such as the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which necessitates the acquisition of a warrant in order to access electronic information (EFF calls it “the nation’s strongest electronic surveillance law”). In addition, she helped the EFF put together California’s Reader Privacy Act, which requires a “super warrant” for government access.
In addition, while working alongside EFF, she litigated civil liberties cases against the NSA, and drafted amicus briefs on technology issues at all levels of state and federal court, including the US Supreme Court and California Supreme Court.
“Many of us already know her,” communications director Josh Richman wrote today in an article published on EFF’s website, “and she’s basically as close to EFF ‘family’ as someone can be without actually having worked here.”
Cindy Cohn’s Road Ahead
With an employment history of 25-plus years at EFF, you might be thinking that outgoing director Cohn is headed to the retirement pasture. Not true; not yet. Cohn is leaving EFF to exchange the office for the courtroom. As Richman put it: “Cindy is leaving EFF later this month – not to retire, but to find a role that puts her back in the courtroom doing what she does best: suing the government! She’ll still be part of the EFF community.”
Indeed, it was Cohn’s prowess as an attorney that brought her to EFF to begin with. In 1993 the organization asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to US export restrictions on cryptography. After that, she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel from 2000 through 2015, when she became executive director. Along the way, she found the time to co-host EFF’s award-winning “How to Fix the Internet” podcast that got started about five years ago.
“Simply put, Cindy Cohn is an EFF institution,” Gigi Sohn, EFF’s board chair said in a September news release about her departure. “Under her leadership, the organization has grown tremendously, cementing its role as the premier defender of digital privacy, free speech and innovation in the US, and perhaps the world.”
Back in March, when Ozer was first chosen for the job she posted on Bluesky, “So proud to take the torch from Cindy Cohn and lead EFF forward in its next chapter. Together, we can meet the challenges and keep building a future where technology works for the people.”
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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