YouSaid · the spoken record

Cindy Cohn

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-01-19
most recent: 2019-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of which only a few companies have the power, right? The two companies, you and I were talking about this, but the two companies, I think, would be Facebook and Google, or Google particularly who have.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, kind of the tiny little cuts on people's privacy have been visible, but they've all felt tiny. And what you haven't seen is this gigantic infrastructure back behind things that is collecting all that data, organizing that data, analyzing all that data, and increasingly running it through algorithms.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and even a good person who doesn't understand the broader context can cause trouble. But yes. And, you know, if you build it, they will come. This data doesn't stay in the hands of angels. It certainly doesn't all around the world. And it's one of the things that, for instance, that Apple said to the FBI around opening up the iPhone, they said, well, even if we do it for you, what do we do when the next government comes walking? Now, that's not Apple holding the data, that's Apple holding the keys that lets them into your data, but it's the same problem. It is the case that I think people have been...”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of anybody that I had an argument with one of the Google founders about this, and they're like, we're nice people. I go today. Yeah. And I said, and who knows who's going to run it? Your information in the hands of a bad person, I don't even want to think about it. Yeah.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that it's one of the things that humans have a hard time with, right? They have a really hard time with a small thing that happens here that could lead to a big problem down the line and they have a really hard time if you can't see direct causation between one and the other. And surveillance is one of those issues where both of those things exist. And so it's hard for people to think, you know, I mean, look, I mean, it's hard for people in our age and our generation right now, people who live through World War II, you know, there's not a Holocaust survivor who doesn't understand the risk of having big databases in the hands of anybody that will allow you to be tracked. And certainly people around the world, I go to Cambodia, I go to any place where there's been massive human rights violation, almost all of them have been fed by the data that is collected by the people because that's how you figure out the people you want from the people you don't, whether it's Hutus and Tutis or whatever.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's also not started that way, Cindy. I mean, it's a creep in a lot of ways that you can do these things. It's the sort of boiling the frog kind of thing as you're used to it and then you let nest in your home, then you let this in your home, and this is easier for Amazon to have a key to your house and on and on and on. And it's met with, you know, what's interesting, I was talking about an antitrust lawyer the other day, and they're like, the problem is we can't prove consumer harm because people like it. You know what I mean? We have to change the idea of what antitrust is, for example, because it's more and more convenient. It's more and more stuff that you want. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because surveillance can be not as, it can be not sort of a malevolent seeming in the beginning.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, you're not under siege. You have nothing to hide, you know, it's a very white perspective, it's an upper middle class perspective, and there are communities that we need to protect. We have our journalists, we have our activists, we have our muckrakers, and we have communities that are disproportionately watched regardless and are vulnerable to this kind of surveillance. And thinking about these issues as individual rights is, I think, the biggest problem from the get-go instead of thinking about this as a collective right, this privacy protection against surveillance is a collective right, and we have to work all of us together to Provide it for”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. So I think the biggest thing that I learned from working on this issue with EFF is, you know, I definitely went into this issue and encountered this attitude all around me as I was working on it is this idea that, you know, I have nothing to hide. So what's the problem with, you know, this kind of surveillance and this attitude is an incredibly privileged attitude to have.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've got a system with a bunch of set rules, and those rules are not widely interpretable, and you've got a sense, a huge set of data that you can tell whether it's right or it's wrong, you can get a machine to automate in ways that seem really miraculous. But when you get beyond that relatively narrow scope of things where you're trying to do things where you really need context, where you really need things like that, when you don't have good data, right? If you use policing data to try to predict who's a criminal, you're not predicting who's a criminal. you're predicting who the police think is a criminal, which we all know is a very different set of things. Absolutely. So these problems permeate and they're going to permeate any system. I'm getting back to the copyright. I'm not going to do that for that.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, It is about watching everybody and when you build systems with this idea that you can technologically watch everybody and magically tell who's good and who's bad through any kind of technology they're going to fail, which is why it's frankly I think you don't have to be digital. I mean the idea that Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech was in our constitution isn't because everybody always thought all speech was great. It's because of this fundamental problem that you give too much power to somebody when you give them the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak and adding a machine to that mix doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. Yeah.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes to the rest of the literally going to be about criminal activity. I mean, I just don't, that's where it's going to be about health. It's going to be about this. It's going to be about watching everybody. It is about watching everybody.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The AI is not going to save us. And there's a great piece in here by Virginia Eubanks who has been tracking the problems with algorithmic decision-making, especially their disproportionate effect on the poor. Once again, the poor and people of color have this stuff. Deployed against them before it comes to the rest of the place. It's”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, boing boing, Corey did this hilarious kind of recursive thing where he did a story about. And they have never worked. We've seen this all the way back from the breastfeeding mothers on, you know, a picture.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we haven't yet seen one, and I think there are really good reasons why we won't ever see one that's not massively overbroad or underbroad and just wrong. Filters don't work. And as we've seen just most recently with Tumblr trying to get rid of adult content, they override.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of this does have to do with how lazy they were in doing this in the first place by just opening platforms up, you know what I mean? They didn't put in systems in place whatsoever. You think any system is a problem.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which they were trying to ferret out the copyright that was posted on all these platforms, which was the fight of the last era, right? That's right, of media companies getting their stuff hijacked by...”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there's too much copyright in it because it really was aimed more at privacy and surveillance and stuff. I mean, this is not reflected in the volume, but a lot of the surveillance techniques that we're now seeing deployed in other contexts were developed under copyright, right? Where the industry insisted that a lot of technologies be built so that you could watch what users do because you can't trust users. And the story was that you can't trust users because of copyright.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that one is kind of a capstone interview. They talk about mass surveillance primarily, but it's kind of a great, it comes early in the issue for this reason. It kind of lays out just a primer for. And what about copyright coverage?”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so too. I mean, you know, increasingly, you know, there's certainly a lot of work to be done to put pressure on Facebook to be better. Most of the pressure that we put on them is to empower users, right? And one of the best ways you empower users is to let them go. I kind of have been saying that Facebook doesn't really have users or customers. They have hostages at this point. And letting people go, giving them the tools so that they can take their data and leave and go somewhere else, or use open APIs. I mean, I think the other thing that we all really need to resist is the idea that there is only one network or only two networks. Like we need to develop, you know, this is some of the work that my friend Bruster Kale is doing at the Internet Archives, a decentralized web so that we don't have to put so much pressure on Facebook because people can leave platforms. Yeah, there are other good options, this idea that there's five giant platforms and everything is there. There's two.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do something. We're not going to do that. With the idea that you're not disempowered because you do feel that way. Even we'll talk about this in a little bit with Facebook, you don't know what to do. You need to just go off it or do something to make them change or at least demand changes and you feel just one of the many. And one of the arguments when I did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg was, well, we're free. And I was like, so people without money have to put up with shit. Like it was kind of an interesting. But that's what he thinks. Like he's giving you all this great stuff. So put up or shut up, you know, kind of thing.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in fact, there was just a study that came out over the last couple of days around this that confirmed what I think a lot of our intuition was, which is that there's this sense that the advertisers push and the big platforms push, which is that people don't really care about their privacy. What we're discovering is that that's actually not the case. People just feel unempowered. They feel like there's nothing they can do. They can't really function, that they don't really have a choice or a voice.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she's talking about the idea of recapturing as a black woman. And this happens largely in the black community, how this idea of recapturing your image and how it's this statement about technology and about taking it back and framing yourself. Yeah, that was a really beautiful letter she wrote for us. Some other pieces Corey Doctorow wrote a wonderful piece about peak indifference and privacy nihilism, which was a really important topic. I think Cindy also wrote about in her foreword for about kind of this idea of people feeling like the issue has gone so far that we can't pull ourselves back from it. We become nihilistic immediately as you realize that there's a problem. Yeah, you realize that”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Georgetown professor Alvaro Bodoya, who runs the Color of Surveillance Conference, is different to mine in. And Malkia Cerrel, and there are others as well, but it was really important for me that we not talk about just how surveillance affects the kind of people who we think of as the technical digerati, but actually where this stuff really comes from and hits the hardest is not our community.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit. But, you know, so we had some people who think kind of on Ethan Zuckerman, who kind of is a kind of a wildly intelligent technologist. We have people who track things. We have people who do other things, kind of different pieces of where trust is ending, really, you know, whether you're looking at Mr. Snowden's pieces about the blockchain. This is kind of the end of trust money, right? Other people are talking about copyright, other people were talking about future FOIA requests. I thought it was really important that we include voices from people of color because when we talk about surveillance, the surveillance society we've built for ourselves now really is more familiar to people of color. They have been targeted by surveillance disproportionately for a long time. And a lot of the things that we're now seeing being deployed, say, in our streets, were first deployed against people of color. And so having”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pull from that, and what were you looking for, Cindy? Because you also want the end of trust, you also, there's people who don't agree with you. So, did you want to create that, the idea of a debate, or just this is like, here's the 10 things we need to be worried about?”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is funny, right? I mean, because you've got science fiction as a whole genre right now, especially, I think, really overloaded with dystopian futures. And I think that's a reaction. They all are actually. And I'm almost at my point trying to pivot towards the other side. I keep joking that, you know, sexual politics aside, I'd like to get back to the Jetsons.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some of the companies are trying to reach out to science fiction writers and have them do some of that thinking for them. And I think that's useful too long, I think, folks in Silicon Valley really couldn't step outside of their own experience of things and look at how somebody might misuse stuff.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I recently was telling a bunch of people who make products at these companies what they should do is every time they think of a product, what is the black mirror episode of it? What would be the bad story that would make us very upset? What's the worst case scenario?”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a whole bunch of speculative fiction is a kind of science fiction, a science fiction purist will probably cringe that I said that. But I think you can't build a better world unless you can envision it And you also can't be clear-eyed at our world unless you describe it really clearly. And so this volume is really about the clear-eyed view of the world we're in right now. And then the fiction work is really kind of how do we take the next step.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the concept. And so, how did Cindy, how did you guys get involved? So they're novices, they don't know a lot about it beyond Dave's books And one of my designers, Soraya Okuda, had worked with Dave in the past. Who I Said, would EFF be interested? We have long That if we're going to build a really good digital future, it can't just be the lawyers and the”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's never been more important than right now. It's astonishing after 20 years. Like, this is sort of the time where now it's really starting some of these issues are really coming to the 430 or 20 or 30 years.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were founded in 1990, so we predate the World Wide Web, and we were founded by some early internet folks who really recognize that The balances Into the digital age, and they wanted to make sure there was an organization out there advocating for users.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“United Nations I met some of the early internet. And it just became really clear to me that this digital living in and that we were going to be joining was going to have Interesting questions To join in one of the earliest”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To 2015. Through all of the copyright wars and things like that. Doing digital rights in the 90s, though I was counsel in one of the cases that freed up encryption technology, which is how you have security online from government control. And the work that I and others did to free up encryption is why you can have a private Online So I've been.”
2019-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: EFF boss Cindy Cohn and McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT