I'm hardly a disinterested party here, obviously. I was at Cindy's wedding, I've danced with her at Burning Man, and I've worked with her for most of my adult life. What's more, I was present for many of the pivotal moments she recounts in this book. But still: this is a *great* book that I found utterly captivating.

2/

Cohn's been with EFF since its earliest days, when she litigated one of the most important cases in computing history, the *Bernstein* case, which legalized civilian access to encryption technology and changed the world:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

3/

Cryptographers had been arguing with the US government over the ban on working encryption technology for years before Cohn joined the fight, and they'd tried all manner of arguments to overturn the ban: technical arguments, political arguments, financial arguments. All of these efforts failed - they didn't even make a dent.

4/

Cohn's genius was the way she formulated a free speech argument about the ban on encryption: arguing that computer code was a form of expressive speech, entitled to protection under the First Amendment. While she didn't come up with this idea, it was her gift for assembling a narrative and a cadre of unimpeachable experts that carried the day.

5/

In this age of bad faith right-wing trolling about "free speech" and "cancel culture," it's easy to forget how central free speech cases and causes have been for the advancement of human rights and human thriving. Free speech cases gave us the nation's first privacy protections, protection for unions, and protection for civil rights organizers.

6/

Cohn never forgets this. Her decades with EFF are a history of the fight for speech rights (and thus privacy rights) on the internet. After the US government seized on the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to dismantle privacy and turn the internet into a system of ubiquitous surveillance, Cohn (along with EFF, of course!) was at the center of the fight for digital rights.

7/

The same prescience and strategic brilliance that led her to take up the Bernstein case and win it were with her through those millennial years, and her description of our cases, campaigns and fights in those years vividly foreshadows the moment we are in today.

The same goes for her "three letter agency" chapter, which takes up our fights against the NSA and other US agencies in the wake of whistleblower disclosures by Mark Klein and Edward Snowden.

8/

These accounts are one part master class in legal tactics; one part battle cry for a global pushback against the transformation of the internet into the perfect surveillance and control machine, and one part personal memoir of a tactician, finding ways to leverage a righteous cause to raise a guerrilla army of experts, co-counsel, amici, and champions who carried our message to the world.

9/

All of this is connected back to her *other* legal career, as a human rights defender litigating on behalf of the survivors of a massacre perpetrated by a death squad working on behalf of Chevron in Nigeria. Cohn skilfully connects these very concrete, visible human rights struggles to the invisible - and no less important - human rights work she carried out for EFF.

10/

I didn't just have a front-row seat for this stuff - I had backstage passes for a lot of it (though not the juiciest national security cases, which required EFF lawyers to maintain total secrecy from colleagues, spouses, even our board, on pain of a long prison sentence for disclosing classified information).

11/