Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Formation	1990
Founder	•  Mitch Kapor •  John Perry Barlow •  John Gilmore
Type	501(c)(3) Nonprofit organization
Interest of	Cory Doctorow
Sponsored by	Open Philanthropy, Swedish Postcode Foundation
Membership	•  Brian Behlendorf •  Anil Dash •  Sarah Deutsch •  David Farber •  John Gilmore •  Brewster Kahle •  Pamela Samuelson •  Bruce Schneier •  Gigi Sohn •  Shari Steele •  James Vasile •  Jonathan Zittrain
Digital civil liberties group

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California.

The EFF provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms and online civil liberties, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use and solicits a list of what it considers abusive patents with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.

Criticism

Yasha Levine, writing in 2018, described the EFF as astroturf created and funded by Silicon Valley, stating they do not actually defend rights for the users of Internet platforms, instead defending large Internet companies (which are, according to him, EFF's biggest benefactors) by lobbying for said companies' interests and deviating attention from their business practices (especially regarding copyright and privacy) to government practices regarding privacy and censorship, as well as actually acting in ways that actively harm Internet users.

 

A Document by Electronic Frontier Foundation

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:White House Must Establish Disinformation Defense and Free Expression Task Force	open letter	29 April 2021	Censorship Freedom of speech NGO "Disinformation" COVID-19/Censorship "Conspiracy theory" 2021 Washington D.C. Riots US/2020 Presidential election	A number of alleged "free-speech organizations" begging to join the US government in implementing censorship in an Orwellian-named "Free Expression Task Force".

 

Known members

3 of the 12 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
John Gilmore	One of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Bruce Schneier	An expert on cryptography, who has written over a dozen books on the subject.
Jonathan Zittrain	WEF AGM repeat visitor, GLT 2000, YGL 2005, CFR and EFF member

 

Sponsors

Event	Description
Open Philanthropy	Grant maker funneling deep state money among other things to pandemic planning. Financed Event 201.
Swedish Postcode Foundation

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