NORTHERN CALIFORNIA — Nicole Ozer will begin her tenure as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on June 1. After 26 years with the organization, Cindy Cohn decided to leave the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a U.S. digital rights nonprofit. Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as the longtime leader of the organization.

Ozer said she plans to broaden support for EFF by involving unconventional voices in litigation to block potential government tech abuses in the AI era. "I've worked together with EFF over the last 20 years," said Ozer, incoming executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Ozer served as the founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the ACLU of Northern California. She partnered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for decades on litigation.

"We've won critical civil rights cases at all levels of state and federal court," she said. "We've passed dozens of laws."

"I went to law school specifically to work on these issues because I came from movement work, and I started to realize just how critical technology was going to be," she said. She said she trained as a leader and strategist before becoming a litigator and learned from strategists of the civil rights movement while serving in AmeriCorps.

Her work has focused on the intersection of social justice movements and technology issues. "A lot of folks still saw technology issues as quite siloed from civil rights issues," she said.

"The hypotheticals have really become the realities," she said. Ozer said that fears about potential government abuses have become realities under the Trump administration.

Her priorities include growing EFF internally and externally by involving more people across America. "We need everyone in this fight to build the digital future that we deserve," she said.

Cohn said that Ozer's plan makes her a perfect fit for the executive director role at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cohn was one of the first litigators at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Since its founding, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has aimed to pass a comprehensive federal data privacy law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed and supported lawsuits to protect Americans' rights to track ICE activity and share information anonymously online.

Cohn's memoir Privacy's Defender was published earlier this month. In 2022, Cohn started writing her memoir, which traces the history of three major EFF lawsuits involving individuals translating technical concepts in courts and establishing legal standards for online privacy.