Our lives are increasingly moving online We seem to be perpetually glued to our smartphones, tablets and Facebook posts and the effect of this activity on our rights is of perhaps greater importance than ever before. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been at the forefront of the fight in defense of our digital rights. This week Progressive Lawyer talks with EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo. According to EFF, Nate is a Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team. In addition to his focus on free speech and privacy litigation, Nate works on EFF’s Who Has Your Back? report and Coders’ Rights Project. Nate has projects involving automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, electronic privacy law reform, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state. A 2009-2010 EFF Open Government Legal Fellow, Nate spent two years in private practice before returning to his senses and to EFF in 2012. Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a J.D. from U.C. Hastings where he has taught first-year legal writing and moot court.about what the organization does and how their work affects us all. He brews his own beer, has been to India three times, and watches too much Bollywood.
Progressive Lawyer: Hello! Introduce yourself and describe your role in EFF.
Nate Cardozo: I’m a staff attorney on the civil liberties team here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I work on free speech and privacy issues, as well as focusing on the Coders’ Rights project. I have projects involving anonymous speech, government transparency, automotive privacy, surveillance, and the freedom to use cryptography currently ongoing.
PL: Why was your organization started? What issues does it confront?
NC: EFF was started in 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor. There is a long description here: https://www.eff.org/about/history but fundamentally, EFF was formed because the founders realized that the courts and law enforcement didn’t understand the latest technology, and that was going to impact free speech rights. We’ve continued to fight for free speech as well as privacy and innovation for technology users around the world — working to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.