Electronic Frontier Foundation

John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990, with additional support from John Gilmore and Steve Wozniak. The purpose of the EFF was to raise funds for lobbying, litigation, and education about civil liberties on the Internet. The EFF's Web site also currently serves as an archive for a broad spectrum of information about the Internet.

The formation of the EFF was prompted primarily by the reaction of Barlow and Kapor to efforts by the Secret Service and the FBI to crack down on hackers during early 1990. Both Kapor and Barlow were questioned by law-enforcement authorities about suspected connections to hackers. Both reached the conclusion that law-enforcement agencies were dangerously uninformed about the new forms of communication occurring through computers and the Internet. They felt that there was a need to increase civil-liberties protections for online communication.

Barlow, previously a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, were participants on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) bulletin board service (BBS). Barlow and Kapor had met through their participation on the WELL, and when Barlow posted an account of his encounter with the FBI, the two got together, exchanged information about their experiences, and decided to form the EFF.

The EFF's first important battle related directly to the investigations that had sparked its formation. In its attempt to track down various hackers thought to be in possession of an illegally obtained telephone-company document, the Secret Service raided a small role-playing-game company called Steve Jackson Games, confiscating computer equipment and other materials, without which the business was unable to function. Unable to find any copies of the document in question, the Secret Service eventually returned the equipment and did not press charges. However, they had deleted unrelated personal email contained on BBS files. The EFF brought suit against the government on behalf of Steve Jackson Games, charging that the search warrant used during the raid had been insufficient, and that the privacy rights of the BBS users had been violated by the erasure of their personal email. The suit was successful on most points, and received a significant amount of press coverage. The EFF's involvement with this and other hacker-related cases provided the organization with considerable early publicity. It quickly gained respect among many computer-related and Internet subcultures, and became a force to contend with in legal and political battles relating to computer-mediated communication and commerce.

Since that initial case, the EFF has been involved in litigation relating to a wide range of online and computer-related civil-liberty issues. In general, it has sought to extend free speech and privacy rights to online communications, including such forms of “speech” as encryption and other computer programs. It was particularly active in opposing the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1995, instigating the “Blue Ribbon Campaign,” in which hundreds of Web sites displayed a blue ribbon graphic in protest of the passing of the CDA.

In 1991, the EFF moved its offices from Cambridge to Washington, D.C., in order to engage more directly in attempts to influence governmental policy and legislation regarding computers and the [Page 173]Internet. The somewhat controversial move was seen by some of the EFF's online supporters as “selling out” to political interests in the government. While in Washington, in affiliation with the Digital Privacy and Security Working Group (DPSWG), a coalition of more than 50 communications and computer companies and civil-liberty groups, the EFF successfully lobbied to stop the Digital Telephony bill, which would have greatly increased the scope of the FBI's powers to perform wiretaps on digital communications. When a similar act was proposed during the Clinton administration in 1994, the EFF got involved in drafting a weaker alternative that eventually passed. However, as it considered even the weakened version to be an unnecessary intrusion on privacy, the EFF did not fully support the legislation it had helped draft.

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