Naomi Brockwell
Naomi Brockwell
• President, Ludlow Institute (non-profit focused on helping people protect their privacy)
• Creator, NBTV (privacy education channel with 1M+ subscribers across platforms)
• Lead drafter of H.R. 8470, the Surveillance Accountability Act, introduced to the U.S. House on April 23, 2026. The bill closes the third-party doctrine loophole, bans warrantless ALPR, biometric, and location dragnets, voids contractual waivers of Fourth Amendment rights against the government, and creates a private right of action against federal agents who violate the Fourth Amendment.
Session
The surveillance state is exploding. Flock cameras blanket the country. Palantir watches everything. ICE buys location data by the truckload. Age-verification mandates are being baked into operating systems. And the developers building tools to push back are getting arrested.
We are losing this fight. But we don't have to.
Past generations of hackers already wrote the playbook for winning fights like this one. Phil Zimmermann beat the U.S. export-control regime by publishing PGP source code. Cult of the Dead Cow forced Microsoft to take security seriously by handing out 10,000 CDs of a Windows exploit at DEF CON. Matt Blaze killed the Clipper Chip with a single peer-reviewed paper. We can follow the same playbook.
This talk walks through how they succeeded, and what the community needs to do right now to win current surveillance war.