While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from earlier this week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” (MIT Press).

Part memoir, part battle cry, “Privacy’s Defender” is the story of Cindy’s fights alongside the visionaries who looked at the early internet and understood that the legal and political battles over this new technology - the Crypto Wars, the NSA’s dragnet, the FBI gag orders - were really over the future of free speech, privacy, and power for all.

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, March 10 in front of a packed house at San Francisco’s iconic City Lights Bookstore. You can also watch the video on YouTube.

For more about the book and Cindy’s national book tour - with stops in places including Seattle, Silicon Valley, Denver, Boston, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Washington DC and New York City - check out https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender

And finally, stay tuned to this feed; we’re working on a special podcast series featuring key players and moments from the book!

A new podcast from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The digital world isn't just a place you visit on your phone. It's the battleground where tomorrow's civil liberties will be won—or lost. Each episode of the EFFector podcast will fill you in on the most important news in digital rights, highlighting key developments in the fight for a world where technology supports freedom, not tyranny.

We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed. In this clip from EFFector, we're talking about how advertising surveillance enables government surveillance.

Subscribe to EFFector wherever you get your podcasts.

All this season, “How to Fix the Internet” has been focusing on the tools and technology of freedom – and one of the most important tools of freedom is a library. Access to knowledge not only creates an informed populace that democracy requires, but also gives people the tools they need to thrive. And the internet has radically expanded access to knowledge in ways that earlier generations could only have dreamed of – so long as that knowledge is allowed to flow freely.

(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

A passionate advocate for public internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his life intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, government information, and software of our cultural heritage – and works with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library that’s accessible to all. The Archive is known for the Wayback Machine, which lets users search the history of almost one trillion web pages. But it also archives images, software, video and audio recordings, documents, and it contains dozens of resources and projects that fill a variety of gaps in cultural, political, and historical knowledge. Kahle joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how the free flow of knowledge makes all of us more free.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• The role AI plays in digitizing, preserving, and easing access to all kinds of information
• How EFF helped the Internet Archive fight off the government’s demand for information about library patrons
• The importance of building a decentralized, distributed web to finding and preserving information for all
• Why building revolutionary, world-class libraries like the Internet Archive requires not only money and technology, but also people willing to dedicate their lives to the work
• How nonprofits are crucial to filling societal gaps left by businesses, governments, and academia

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, which serves millions of people each day and is among the world’s largest libraries. After studying AI at and graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, Kahle helped launch the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, he helped create the internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS); WAIS Inc. was later sold to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. He is a former member of EFF’s Board of Directors.