Nicole Ozer

Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (from June 1, 2026) · Former Founding Director, ACLU NorCal Technology & Civil Liberties Program

San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA

EFF (Executive Director from June 2026)ACLU NorCal (2004–2025)UC Law SF – Center for Constitutional DemocracyUC Berkeley School of Law (Lecturer)Harvard Kennedy School (2024–25 Fellow)

Biography

Nicole Ozer is a California-based civil liberties lawyer and technology policy advocate whose career has been defined by a single through line: using law, organizing, and coalition-building to ensure that technology serves access, equity, and justice rather than concentrating power over people's lives in the hands of governments and corporations. On March 26, 2026, EFF's Board of Directors announced her appointment as Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, effective June 1, 2026 — succeeding Cindy Cohn, who led EFF for eleven years after joining as its first staff attorney in 1993. The appointment followed a nationwide search conducted with the leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates.

Ozer graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1997 with a BA in American Studies, concentrating in Black Studies and Sociology; she studied comparative civil rights history at the University of Cape Town, South Africa as part of that program. She earned her JD with a Certificate in Law and Technology from UC Berkeley School of Law in 2003, where she served as Co-President of her law school class. Before joining the ACLU she was an intellectual property attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco. She also proudly served in the pilot program of the AmeriCorps National Service Program in the summer of 1993, and describes herself as having come to law school specifically to work on civil liberties and technology issues after formative years in movement work.

ACLU Northern California — Founding the Technology and Civil Liberties Program (2004–2025)

In 2003, Ozer was hired by the ACLU of Northern California to develop its Technology and Civil Liberties Program — one of the first such dedicated civil liberties programs in the country focused on the intersection of technology and rights. She served as its founding director from 2004 to 2025, building what became a nationally recognized model for integrated technology advocacy: coordinating litigation, legislative work, community organizing, corporate engagement, and public education in a single strategic approach. Over two decades she led campaigns that changed California law, changed corporate behaviour, and changed the national landscape of technology civil liberties.

The flagship legislative achievement of her ACLU tenure was the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), which Ozer spearheaded and which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law in October 2015. CalECPA established a warrant requirement for government access to Californians' electronic communications — emails, text messages, location data, cloud documents — making it what EFF and civil liberties organizations described at the time as the nation's strongest electronic surveillance law. The bill had broad co-sponsorship from EFF, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and an unusually wide coalition of technology companies and civil rights organizations. A companion achievement was the California Reader Privacy Act, requiring a "super warrant" for government access to reading records in the digital age.

A second major strand of Ozer's ACLU work was designing a model for local democratic oversight of surveillance technology — what she describes as "groundbreaking local surveillance reform strategies." The framework, now known as CCOPS (Community Control Over Police Surveillance), requires local government bodies to approve any new surveillance technology before acquisition, with public participation in the decision. Her ACLU team drafted and helped pass the first local facial recognition ban in San Francisco in 2019, and since then coalitions across the country have passed more than 25 laws based on the model, collectively covering more than 17 million people. The campaign also succeeded in winning moratoriums on law enforcement sales from major technology companies including Amazon — whose Rekognition facial recognition service Ozer's team first exposed in 2018 and then, in a celebrated demonstration, showed could falsely identify 28 members of Congress as criminals, with results disproportionately affecting members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Ozer was also a co-author of the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, a framework drafted in 2018 by EFF, the ACLU of Northern California, the Open Technology Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and others, establishing baseline standards for how social platforms should notify users of removals, provide appeals, and publish data on moderation decisions. She helped build and lead a global coalition against facial recognition through advocacy before companies, investors, and government bodies, and has presented at DEF CON, SXSW, RSA, Black Hat, RightsCon, and numerous academic and government conferences. Her published work includes Harvard Kennedy School research on building people-powered US privacy law in the AI era.

Centre for Constitutional Democracy and Harvard Fellowship (2024–2026)

From 2024 to 2025 Ozer was a technology and human rights fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she produced work on US privacy law and the challenges of surveillance in the AI era. In September 2025 she was announced as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). She served in that role for approximately seven months before being named EFF's executive director — with the Centre for Constitutional Democracy noting she would move approximately five blocks from its offices to EFF's San Francisco headquarters.

Appointment as EFF Executive Director

When EFF's Board announced Ozer's appointment, Board Chair Gigi Sohn described her as "the ideal person to lead EFF during this unprecedented time in our nation's history," noting her vision, management skills, deep substantive knowledge, and two decades of partnership with EFF. Cindy Cohn, who is writing a memoir about her years at EFF and who had worked with Ozer as a close partner across the CalECPA campaign and many other fights, said she was "couldn't be happier" to hand over EFF's reins. EFF board member Anil Dash described the appointment as "incredibly exciting" given the organization's essential mission. In her own statement at the announcement, Ozer said: "EFF's work has been my life's work. EFF's people are my community, and EFF has been my closest partner for more than two decades." In an interview with The Register at the time of the announcement, she described her goal as ensuring technology is working for people, with particular emphasis on AI. She also indicated that expanding EFF's resources and reach — both internally and externally — would be central to her early priorities as executive director.

Ozer brings to EFF a specific and documented set of advocacy techniques: coalition-building across civil rights, technology, business, and faith communities; simultaneous pressure through the courts, legislatures, and direct corporate engagement; and a particular skill in making technical surveillance and privacy policy legible and mobilizing to non-specialist publics. She has been recognised with the Fearless Advocate Award from the American Constitution Society, the Privacy Award from the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and in 2025 received a California Senate Members Resolution for her career of public service.

Nicole Ozer
Executive Director (from June 1, 2026)
Electronic Frontier Foundation
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109, USA

Education: JD with Certificate in Law and Technology, UC Berkeley School of Law, 2003 · BA magna cum laude (American Studies, Black Studies, Sociology), Amherst College, 1997

EFF: eff.org  |  EFF staff page: eff.org/about/staff/nicole-ozer

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