2026-11-05 –, Jasmine Stage 4
Privacy is a fundamental human right that enables our other fundamental rights. When society at large can't or won't stop the spread of ubiquitous surveillance, we need strong privacy technologies that return control and autonomy to users. Come learn about what’s at stake, understand the threats to privacy and supporting technologies, and how we can work to protect our right to build the tools we need,
Privacy is essential to a free society, as the building block on which our fundamental rights stand, and strong privacy enhancing technologies are necessary to enable people to protect their rights in the face of an increasingly surveilled world. These technologies are increasingly getting targeted, with policymakers pushing for backdoors and other required weaknesses or mandated surveillance capabilities, and more recently threats to the people who write the code and provide the services that make privacy possible, not just the people who use it.
This talk will discuss why we need strong privacy and the tools that enable it, the threat landscape that we face as individuals and as builders, and how we can push back, both with building for resilient privacy enhancing technologies and by working together to create the legal and policy space necessary for a free society.
Kurt Opsahl has worked on technology law and policy for close to 30 years. He has helped shape the law on fair use, free expression, and online privacy, and helped establish and defend the principle that code is speech. He has long supported privacy-enhancing technologies, security researchers, open-source projects, and the decentralized web.
Kurt is Of Counsel to Ridder, Costa & Johnstone, a boutique technology law firm. From 2004 to 2023, he was Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he continues to assist EFF as a volunteer Special Counsel. After EFF, he served as Associate General Counsel and then General Counsel of the Filecoin Foundation. He is President of the Board of both the Security Research Legal Defense Fund and the Financial Privacy Foundation, and a member of the OpenArchive Advisory Board and the Zcash Community Advisory Panel.