Nate Cardozo

Nate Cardozo is an American attorney and privacy engineer who spent roughly six and a half years as a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where he became a prominent voice on encryption policy, government surveillance, and digital civil liberties. He held the title of Senior Staff Attorney on EFF's digital civil liberties team, with some press accounts describing him as EFF's "senior information security counsel."

Work at EFF

At EFF, Cardozo's practice spanned free speech and privacy litigation, cryptography and information-security law, automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware-hacking rights, anonymous speech, and reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). He led EFF's Coders' Rights Project, which defends programmers — particularly security and encryption researchers — against legal threats such as the DMCA that can chill vulnerability research, and he contributed to EFF's annual "Who Has Your Back?" report series grading major tech companies on how they handle government requests for user data.

Much of Cardozo's public writing pushed back on government efforts to weaken encryption and expand surveillance without oversight. In August 2016, with EFF colleague Andrew Crocker, he argued in a Deeplinks post that the U.S. needed a public, legally grounded framework — a "Title III for hacking" — to govern how the FBI and other agencies acquire and use security vulnerabilities, criticizing the secrecy around the government's Vulnerabilities Equities Process. In August 2018 he co-authored "Don't Shoot the Messenger," opposing reported efforts to compel Facebook to break Messenger's encryption for a wiretap. In January 2019, in "Give Up the Ghost: A Backdoor by Another Name," he rebutted the UK's GCHQ "Ghost Protocol" proposal, which would have let governments silently join encrypted chats as a hidden participant; Cardozo warned it would force apps to show false security indicators and would erode trust in what software tells users, effectively placing "a dormant wiretap in every single user's pocket."

Move to industry

In February 2019, after about six and a half years at EFF, Cardozo left to become Privacy Policy Manager at WhatsApp, then owned by Facebook — a move widely reported as emblematic of major platforms recruiting their toughest privacy critics. He acknowledged the tension himself, writing that after "the privacy beating that Facebook's taken over the past year, I was skeptical, too." He remained at WhatsApp/Facebook until July 2022, when he moved to Google as a Senior Staff Privacy Engineer working on end-to-end encryption for Android.

Cardozo studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and earned his law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and has spoken at industry events including the RSA Conference on privacy and security-policy topics.

Timeline

• 2016-08-12Co-authored (with Andrew Crocker) the EFF Deeplinks post 'We Shouldn't Wait Another Fifteen Years for a Conversation About Government Hacking,' calling for oversight of government hacking and the Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
• 2018-08-23Co-authored the EFF post 'Don't Shoot the Messenger,' opposing reported government efforts to force Facebook to break Messenger encryption.
• 2019-01-07Published the EFF analysis 'Give Up the Ghost: A Backdoor by Another Name,' rebutting GCHQ's 'Ghost Protocol' proposal for accessing encrypted messaging.
• 2019-02-19Left EFF after roughly six and a half years as staff attorney to become Privacy Policy Manager at WhatsApp (Facebook).
• 2022-07Departed WhatsApp/Facebook to join Google as Senior Staff Privacy Engineer, working on end-to-end encryption for Android.