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Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

ESTABLISHED: July 1990
EMPLOYEES: 8
MEMBERS: 3,000
PAC: None

Contact Information:
ADDRESS: 1550 Bryant St., Ste. 725 San Francisco, CA 94103-4832
PHONE: (415) 436-9333
FAX: (415) 436-9993
E-MAIL: ask@eff.org
URL: http://www.eff.org
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR; PRESIDENT: Tara Lemmey
CHAIRMAN: Lori Fena
VICE-CHAIR: John Perry Barlow

WHAT IS ITS MISSION?

The mission of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is to ensure "that the civil liberties guaranteed in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights are applied to new communications technologies."

HOW IS IT STRUCTURED?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a nonprofit, civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, California. It is headed by a 17-member board of directors made up of some of the most illustrious names in the high-tech industry, as well as prominent writers and social critics. In 1997 the board included Esther Dyson, an MIT professor and writer; John Perry Barlow, one-time Grateful Dead lyricist and Internet expert; Mitchell Kapor, president of the Lotus Corporation; Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog; and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers.

Board decisions and policy are supported and implemented by eight full-time staff members, as well as several consultants and volunteers. Staff members are responsible for areas such as programs, membership, legal issues, and administration.

PRIMARY FUNCTIONS

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's primary function is to protect and promote the civil liberties of people who use on-line technology. In effect, the EFF is dedicated to defending free speech on the Internet by educating policymakers, law enforcement officials, and the general public about issues that affect current and future communications technologies.

The EFF uses a variety of techniques to get its message across. It has participated as a friend of the court in several major legal cases where it believes users' on-line civil liberties have been violated and has challenged proposed legislation aimed at curbing free speech on the Internet such as the Communications Decency Act (CDA). It monitors legislation and agency actions that may affect the on-line community and works at the federal, state, and local levels to change legislation. Members participate in these activities primarily through electronic mail campaigns and on-line political organizing.

In addition to political and legal action, leading EFF board members and staffers write articles for newspapers and magazines expressing the organization's viewpoint, and speak to law enforcement organizations, state attorney bar associations, conferences and summits, and university classes about the technical, social, and political issues and implications of the rapidly expanding on-line world. The EFF also produces official reports about the civil liberties implications of actions by telephone companies, public utility commissions, and network service providers.

PROGRAMS

As a relatively small organization, the EFF has yet to establish long-term programs aimed at supporting its membership. It does, however, actively sponsor and participate in a number of national and international coalitions and campaigns aimed at promoting on-line freedom of expression. These include the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign, which encourages Web masters worldwide to place a blue ribbon logo on their Web sites in support of free speech on the Internet, as well as the Global Internet Liberty Campaign—a broader-based campaign aimed at preventing individual countries from imposing restrictions on Internet activity.

The EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1991 to recognize individuals who, according to the group, significantly contributed "to the development of computer-mediated communications or to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet." Awards are presented annually at the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, which is attended by Internet policy makers and members of the Internet industry.

The organization is also a member of the Internet Free Expression Alliance and the Digital Future Coalition. These groups of like-minded organizations work together to convince government policy makers and industry leaders of the importance of permitting the Internet to remain a center of free expression.

BUDGET INFORMATION

The EFF operates with a relatively small annual budget of approximately __BODY__ to $2 million. Like many other public interest advocacy groups, the EFF sustains its activities through membership dues, individual donations and gifts, and foundation and corporate grants. Major individual donations and foundation and corporate grants range from $10,000 to over $250,000. The EFF also receives many smaller donations from individuals who support its work. Membership dues range from $10 to $500 annually (average membership dues are $40 per year). Special projects and programs such as the EFF/Aerosmith Virtual World Tour of Cyberspace also generate funding. The money is used to cover staff and administrative costs, and to fund legal actions and publications.

HISTORY

According to John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation began with a visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "In late April of 1990," writes Barlow in his A Not Terribly Brief History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "I got a call from Special Agent Richard Baxter of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had been sent to find out if I might be a member of the NuPrometheus League, a dread band of info-terrorists who had stolen and wantonly distributed source code normally used in the Macintosh ROMs."

Barlow neither knew of nor was a member of the NuPrometheus League, but he was concerned that government agents were monitoring his on-line activity. Barlow subsequently posted an account of his experience on the WELL, an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) in Sausalito, California, which at the time was the digital home of some of the nation's most "technically hip folks," including Mitch Kapor, the inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, one of the world's most popular spreadsheet programs.

Kapor had had a similar experience with the FBI and after reading Barlow's account he contacted Barlow and suggested they meet. Together they conceived the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help support legal actions on behalf of computer software publishers and BBS operators whose First Amendment rights may have been challenged. The new organization also stepped in when searches and seizures appeared to have exceeded the authority of the Fourth Amendment, where the government seemed to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and where warrants had been issued with insufficient cause.

An early case involved a role-playing games publisher named Steve Jackson whose office equipment was seized by the Secret Service. His equipment was confiscated in an effort to prevent publication of a game called Cyberpunk which agents believed, incorrectly, to be "a handbook for computer crime." Another case involved Craig Neifdorf, who had published an internal BellSouth document in his electronic magazine Phrack. Although Neidorf's action was completely legal, he was charged with interstate transport of stolen property with a possible sentence of 60 years in jail and $122,000 in fines.

These cases and others highlighted what Barlow described as the "symptoms of a growing social crisis: Future Shock." "America," wrote Barlow, "was entering the Information Age with neither laws nor metaphors for the appropriate protection and conveyance of information itself."

In the early 1990s, confusion and misunderstanding about the Internet and other computer networks was rampant. Sourches such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Time published stories about hackers, crackers, and Internet pornography which had little basis in fact and only served to inflame policy makers and ordinary citizens. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a piece alleging that the document Niedorf had published was a computer virus capable of bringing down the emergency telephone system for the entire country.

The EFF filed an amicus brief (friend of the court) in support of Neidorf and introduced his lawyer to an expert witness whose testimony helped force the government to abandon the case after only four days. As it turned out, the document Neidorf had reproduced in his electronic magazine dealt only with the bureacratic procedures of 911 administration in the BellSouth region and contained nothing that could not easily be obtained through legal means.

The formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was officially announced at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 1990. One of its first official acts was to grant an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) $275,000 for a project on computing and civil liberties. EFF leaders met with congressional staffers, civil libertarians, and officials from the Library of Congress and the White House to discuss issues such as intellectual property, telecommunications policy, and law enforcement techniques in cyberspace.

In addition to organizing legal actions and lobbying for "rational" computer security legislation, the EFF set up two Usenet newsgroups, established an electronic mailing list, and launched EFF forums on the Well and CompuServe to help raise public awareness of the new civil liberties issues being generated by the computer revolution. In 1991, the organization began publishing a newsletter called The EFFector to spread its message to people who might be interested in their work but were not on-line.

During its first year, the EFF also helped organize a major international conference on Communications, Privacy, and Freedom that was to be held in San Francisco in March of 1991. It also helped convince Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts not to sign a computer crime bill which the EFF called "misguided" and organized an effort to rewrite the bill for re-submission to the Massachusetts legislature. The rewritten EFF legislation made a clear distinction between computer trespass and actual malice, proposing appropriate penalties for each.

By 1994 the EFF had grown into a full-fledged nonprofit organization with a full-time staff, paid membership, and tax-exempt status. That same year it finally won the case in which Steve Jackson was involved. Among other things, the federal court's final decision stated that electronic mail could not be read by law enforcement officers without a court-authorized wiretap warrant.

1994 also saw the EFF face its greatest challenge yet—the "Clipper Chip" key escrow encryption proposal. The Clipper Chip was a cryptographic device intended to protect private communications while at the same time permitting government agents to access encrypted private communications using "keys" held by two government "escrow agents." These "keys" could be obtained upon presentation of "legal authorization."

The EFF coordinated a massive grassroots and private industry campaign to prevent the proposal from being signed into law, arguing that "privacy protection will be diminished, innovation will be slowed, government accountability will be lessened, and the openness necessary to ensure the successful development of the nation's communications infrastructure will be threatened."

The Clipper Chip proposal was eventually abandoned, but the EFF soon found itself facing an even greater challenge—the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1995. Developed in response to reports in the media about the prevalence of pornography on the Internet, the CDA was intended to prohibit the "the [computer] equivalent of obscene telephone calls and the distribution to children of materials with sexual content." According to the EFF, however, the legislation would restrict content on the Internet, effectively limiting freedom of speech on the Internet that would far exceed restrictions applied to any other communications media.

When the bill was signed into law by President Clinton in February 1996, thousands of Web pages went black for 48 hours in protest. The EFF immediately announced its intent to challenge the new legislation in court and together with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other like-minded groups requested an injunction against the CDA. On June 12, 1996, a panel of three federal judges in Philadelphia granted a preliminary injunction against the Communications Decency Act, and just over a year later, on June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment and that all provisions of the CDA were unconstitutional.

The death of the CDA may have been an important victory, but on-line civil libertarians still faced many challenges. By the late 1990s the Internet had gone mainstream and was dominated by commercial interests and "surfed" by millions of ordinary citizens around the world. Like any start-up organization, the EFF now had to adopt a more institutional approach if it intended to keep up. It did this by bringing in Barry Steinhardt, the former associate director of the ACLU, to serve as EFF's president and CEO. Appointed in 1998, Steinhardt immediately set about formulating an overall strategy and working to overcome the organization's financial problems. And, according to Steinhardt, "Since the CDA decision there has been a headlong rush to embrace tools that may well create a regime of private-sector censorship that's every bit as troubling as the CDA." Battling these new forms of censorship would be EFF's next task.

CURRENT POLITICAL ISSUES

The Internet has been in existence since the 1970s, but until the 1990s it was used primarily by scientists and researchers to exchange information with colleagues. However, with the development of the World Wide Web and new graphics-based "browsers," interest in the Internet grew exponentially as businesses and individuals began to see the enormous potential of this new medium. But the same things that made the Internet so attractive to so many people also made it the subject of significant debate concerning governance and jurisdiction. The new digital media did not easily fit into existing frameworks and many established legal principles and cultural norms could not easily be applied to a medium that was "nowhere and everywhere at the same time."

The EFF arose in response to this confusion, determined to protect the freedom that existed on the Internet, while helping to establish fair and appropriate principles to govern its content and use. The EFF's main goal is to ensure that "common carriage principles" are maintained in the information age. Common carriage principles require that network providers carry all speech, regardless of its content. The EFF is also working to convince Congress that laws should be enacted enabling broader public access to information.

Aside from freedom of speech issues, one of the EFF's primary concerns is privacy in communications. The organization advocates measures that ensure the public's right to use the most effective encryption technologies available, and opposes any efforts by government to implement measures that would allow government agencies to "eavesdrop" on those communications.

Case Study: The Clipper Chip

On April 16, 1993, the White House officially announced a new encryption technology called the Clipper Chip. Developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), and implemented by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the Clipper proposal was designed to provide the private sector with a secure system for encrypting data, primarily telephone communications, while at the same time allowing law enforcement agencies to tap into these encrypted communications with approval from the Attorney General.

The concept behind the Clipper Chip was simple: Clipper Chip installation would provide encryption of telephone calls or fax transmissions between two phones or fax machines. To prevent monitoring by unauthorized parties, the signal would be scrambled, making it unintelligible to all but the intended recipients. The only catch was that, in order to allow surveillance by law enforcement agencies, the scrambled signal could be decoded by using two data 'keys,' each held by a different government agency and released only when the Attorney General approved a request for them.

The proposal immediately sparked a furious debate. On-line activists and private industry were virtually unanimous in their opposition, claiming that Clipper threatened the future of personal privacy in the United States. Questions were raised about whether the government could be trusted to hold the keys to this system and whether it would actually be effective in fighting violent crime, terrorism, and drugs.

Another fear was that by making Clipper a standard and demanding its incorporation in products made for export, the initiative would cripple U.S. companies and allow overseas competitors to dominate the international markets for encrytion software. After all, as many pointed out, why would anyone want to purchase encryption software or equipment that would allow surveillance by the U.S. government? Despite widespread opposition, President Clinton persisted with the proposal, announcing on February 4, 1994, that Clipper would be a Federal Data Processing Standard, and he backed that statement up by placing an immediate government order for 50,000 Clipper devices.

THe EFF and other anti-Clipper groups such as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) responded by organizing an anti-Clipper petition that eventually collected more than 40,000 signatures. They submitted testimony before congressional committees and lobbied for relaxed export controls on encrytion devices. Above all, they brought the issue to the attention of the mainstream media.

Soon Clipper was the talk of the nation. Few Americans really understood the technology or the issues involved. All they knew was that Clipper would allow the government to listen in on private communications. That alone was enough to turn public opinion against the proposal: a CNN/Time Magazine poll found that 80 percent of the American public was opposed to Clipper.

By the end of 1994, the Clipper Chip was, for all intents and purposes, dead. However the government refused to give up. Later proposals from the administration included Clipper II and Clipper III, software-only versions that would require users to give a copy of their encryption keys to a government-certified agent who would hold them "in trust." Opposition has remained stiff and none of these proposals has yet to win acceptance.

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

Over the years, the EFF has racked up an impressive number of victories at the federal level. It won the Steve Jackson Games case in which a federal court affirmed that electronic mail could not be read by law enforcement officers without a court-authorized wiretap warrant), helped kill the initial Clipper Chip proposal, and took part in a broad and successful coalition to oppose the Communications Decency Act.

None of these victories have been decisive, however. Even as late as 1998, the federal administration was still pushing to impose variations of the original Clipper proposal and despite the Supreme Court's declaration that the Communications Act was unconstitutional, 11 states passed online censorship laws in 1995 and 1996. New attempts to censor Internet content through the use of "anti-porn filters" also proved difficult to halt and in 1998 the Senate Commerce Committee approved the Coats and McCain bills, which among other things would force libraries and schools to use software to filter "indecent speech."

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

According to a 1998 survey conducted by the Federal Trade Commission (Privacy Online: A Report to Congress), privacy continues to be the number one concern for users of the Internet. This is especially true when it comes to conducting on-line business transactions. To that end, the EFF has been working with Microsoft Corp. on a proposition called the Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). If adopted, P3P will allow Web sites to quickly and easily post privacy policies and help safeguard e-commerce transactions.

GROUP RESOURCES

The EFF publishes an electronic bulletin, EFFector Online, as well as a hard copy newsletter, EFFector. It also maintains extensive electronic archives on the Internet at ftp.eff.org, gopher.eff.org, and http://www.eff.org/, and hosts Internet and Usenet conferences, including comp.org.eff.talk. The EFF also maintains active conferences on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), CompuServe (CIS), and elsewhere. The organization also provides a free telephone hot line for members of the on-line community who have questions regarding their legal rights.

To access the EFF's archives, refer to the general EFF brochure (http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/about.eff) or send queries to ask@eff.org. Other resources include: the Online Activism Organizations List, a listing of regional, national and international groups sharing goals similar or complementary to EFF's; the Online Activism Resources List which lists on-line and offline resources for computer-assisted advocacy and grassroots political action; and the FOIA Toolkit, which includes introductory materials and required forms for requesting government information under the Freedom of Information Act. For more information about the organization, write to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1550 Bryant St., Ste. 725, San Francisco, CA 94103-4832, call (415) 436-9333 or E-mail mech@eff.org.

GROUP PUBLICATIONS

EFF publishes an electronic bulletin, "EFFector Online," as well as a hard copy newsletter, "EFFector." For more information on EFF publications, write to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1550 Bryant St., Ste. 725, San Francisco, CA 94103-4832, call (415) 436-9333 or send E-mail to pubs@eff.org.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barlow, John Perry. A Not Terribly Brief History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. San Francisco: Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1990.

——. "Jackboots on the Infobahn: Clipping the Wings of Freedom?" Wired, April 1994.

Bottoms, David. "Cyber-cowboy . . . or Prophet?" Industry Week, 4 December 1995.

Bruning, Fred. "Stay In Center Lane; Maintain Speed; Caution, Advanced Culture Ahead." Newsday, 31 January 1994.

"Communications Decency Act 96: First Wave Of Lashbacks." Online Libraries and Microcomputers, 1 March 1996.

Diamond, Edwin, and Stephen Bates. "Law and Order Comes to Cyberspace." Technology Review, 1 October 1995.

Dyson, Esther, and George Gilder, Jay Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age." New Perspectives Quarterly, 22 September 1994.

Hirschkop, Ken. "Democracy and the New Technologies." Monthly Review, 17 July 1996.

Levy, Stephen. "Clipper Chick." Wired, September 1996.

Sussman, Vic. "Policing Cyberspace." U.S. News and World Report, 23 January 1995.

Trumball, Mark. "Futurist Sees Laissez-Faire Internet." Christian Science Monitor, 14 November 1995.