Video from the launch of the EFF/McSweeney's "End of Trust" project launch with Cindy Cohn, Annalee Newitz, and me!

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, co-edited by McSweeney's editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch event in San Francisco with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, science fiction writer and EFF alumna Annalee Newitz, and me.

Lisa Rein recorded the event for Mondo 2000, producing a partial transcript, an audio recording (MP3) and a video.

Cindy Cohn: The first reason is that theres a fundamental constitutional question at the centerpiece regarding how we are going to interact with our technology, that can make all the other questions easier.

The second reason is that all of the direct actions that you might want to take in order to exercise your self-governance and have your voice heard, requires some kind of legal protection, right? And when we talk about direct action, the reason that you can do direct action and not end up with a very long jail sentence is because, in the United States, compared to other places around the world, is because the Constitution says you can. All the hackers who EFF represents, who tell us all the things about the security problems and the surveillance if we dont get the law right, theyre not going to be able to do that. So, I often say that about EFF that were kind of the plumbers of freedom. Were trying to get the obstacles out of the way, so that all the other things you can do to exercise your rights in the digital world can really flow freely.