eff@well.sf.ca.us (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) (08/19/90)
************************************************************ About the EFF General Information Revised August 1990 ************************************************************ The EFF (formally the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.) has been established to help civilize the electronic frontier; to make it truly useful and beneficial not just to a technical elite, but to everyone; and to do this in a way which is in keeping with our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication. The EFF now has legal status as a corporation in the state of Massachusetts. We are in the process of applying to the IRS for status as a non-profit, 501c3 organization. Once that status is granted contributions to the EFF will be tax-deductible. ************************************************************ Mission of the EFF ************************************************************ 1. to engage in and support educational activities which increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications. 2. to develop among policy-makers a better understanding of the issues underlying free and open telecommunications, and support the creation of legal and structural approaches which will ease the assimilation of these new technologies by society. 3. to raise public awareness about civil liberties issues arising from the rapid advancement in the area of new computer-based communications media and, where necessary, support litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect, and extend First Amendment rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications technology. 4. to encourage and support the development of new tools which will endow non-technical users with full and easy access to computer-based telecommunications. ************************************************************ Current EFF Activities ************************************************************ > We are helping educate policy makers and the general public. To this end we have funded a significant two-year project on computing and civil liberties to be managed by the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. With it, we aim to acquaint policy makers and law enforcement officials of the civil liberties issues which may lie hidden in the brambles of telecommunications policy. Members of the EFF are speaking at computer and government conferences and meetings throughout the country to raise awareness about the important civil liberties issues. We are in the process of forming alliances with other other public interest organizations concerned with the development of a digital national information infrastructure. The EFF is in the early stages of software design and development of programs for personal computers which provide simplified and enhanced access to network services such as mail and netnews. Because our resources are already fully committed to these projects, we are not at this time considering additional grant proposals. > We are helping defend the innocent. We gave substantial legal support in the criminal defense of Craig Neidorf, the publisher of Phrack, an on-line magazine devoted to telecommunications, computer security and hacking. Neidorf was indicted on felony charges of wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property for the electronic publication of a document which someone else had removed, without Neidorf's participation, from a Bell South computer. The government contended that the republication of proprietary business information, even if the information is of public significance, is illegal. The EFF submitted two friend of the court briefs arguing that the publication of the disputed document was constitutionally protected speech. We also were instrumental in locating an expert witness who located documents which were publicly available from Bell South which contained all the information in the disputed document. This information was critical in discrediting the government's expert witness. The government dropped its prosecution in the middle of the trial, when it became aware that its case was untenable. EFF attorneys are also representing Steve Jackson Games in its efforts to secure the complete return and restoration of all computer equipment seized in the Secret Service raid on its offices and to understand what might have been the legal basis for the raid. We are not involved in these legal matters as a "cracker's defense fund," despite press reports you may have read, but rather to ensure that the Constitution will continue to apply to digital media. We intend to demonstrate legally that speech is speech whether it finds form in ink or in ASCII. ************************************************************ What can you do? ************************************************************ For starters, you can spread the word about EFF as widely as possible, both on and off the Net. Feel free, for example, to distribute any of the materials included in this or other EFF mailings. You can turn some of the immense processing horsepower of your distributed Mind to the task of finding useful new metaphors for community, expression, property, privacy and other realities of the physical world which seem up for grabs in these less tangible regions. And you can try to communicate to technically unsophisticated friends the extent to which their future freedoms and well-being may depend on understanding the broad forms of digital communication, if not necessarily the technical details. Finally, you can keep in touch with us at any of the addresses listed below. Please pass on your thoughts, concerns, insights, contacts, suggestions, and news. And we will return the favor. ************************************************************ Staying in Touch ************************************************************ Send requests to be added to or dropped from the EFF mailing list or other general correspondence to eff-request@well.sf.ca.us. We will periodically mail updates on EFF-related activities to this list. If you receive any USENET newsgroups, your site may carry two new newsgroups in the INET distribution called comp.org.eff.news and comp.org.eff.talk. The former is a moderated newsgroup of announcements, responses to announcements, and selected discussion drawn from the unmoderated "talk" group and the mailing list. Everything that goes out over the EFF mailing list will also be posted in comp.org.eff.news, so if you read the newsgroup you don't need to subscribe to the mailing list. Postings submitted to the moderated newsgroup may be reprinted by the EFF. To submit a posting, you may send mail to eff@well.sf.ca.us. There is an active EFF conference on the Well, as well as many other related conferences of interest to EFF supporters. As of August 1990, access to the Well is $8/month plus $3/hour. Outside the S.F. Bay area, telecom access for $5/hr. is available through CPN. Register online at (415) 332-6106. A document library containing all of the EFF news releases, John Barlow's "Crime and Puzzlement" and others is available on the Well. We are working toward providing FTP availability into the document library through an EFF host system to be set up in Cambridge, Mass. Details will be forthcoming. Our Address: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc. One Cambridge Center, Suite 300 Cambridge, MA 02142 (617) 577-1385 (617) 225-2347 (fax) After August 25, 1990: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc. 155 Second Street Cambridge, MA 02142 We will distribute the new telephone number once we have it. ************************************************************ Mitchell Kapor (mkapor@well.sf.ca.us) John Perry Barlow (barlow@well.sf.ca.us) Postings and email for the moderated newsgroup should be sent to "comp-org-eff-news@well.sf.ca.us". ************************************************************