The Eff Is 35, But The Battle To Defend Internet Freedom Is Far From Over

Interview In July 1990, before the World Wide Web even existed, an unusual alliance was formed to fight for the rights of the emerging online community.

Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow – who wrote some of the Grateful Dead’s most epic lyrics – and John Gilmore, co-founder of the GNU Project for free software and employee number five at Sun Microsystems, met in San Francisco to form the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The organization has since been prominent in some of the most important legal battles for privacy, online operations, and legislative correction. The Register sat down with executive director Cindy Cohn to discuss the past, but more importantly what’s coming down the line.

Cindy Cohn

“I got involved at the EFF in 2000 because I knew one of the founders, John Gilmore, socially, and he called me one day and asked me if I was a new lawyer,” she told us.

“I was about three years into my legal practice at a little firm, and he asked me if I wanted to do a lawsuit. The EFF was helping a math PhD student at UC Berkeley named Dan Bernstein, who wanted to publish a cryptography program on the internet and was facing the US export restrictions that essentially would have forbidden him from doing so without a license, and nobody got a license for strong cryptography.”

Bernstein was at the vanguard in the first crypto wars in the ’90s – although some would argue they started before that. The US government had declared that strong cryptography was technically a munition and would therefore have to be licensed before it could be shared or exported. With the EFF’s help, he beat the case.

It was one of the first of many such cases. For example, when telecoms engineer Mark Klein realized he’d set up a system for AT&T to monitor communications through its switching stations and relay data to the US government, he turned up outside the EFF’s offices in 2006 with a shoulder bag full of documents that blew the case wide open.

There’s plenty to do

But it’s the future that the EFF is looking toward, Cohn explained. We’re in an immensely dangerous time, with government information potentially being amassed by Palantir into a massive database that could be used to surveil the populace, and with data brokers harvesting personal information that can be bought by the police to bypass warrant requirements.

“If it’s true that Palantir is building one database tool, we will be looking very closely at ways that we can challenge that because that’s a really bad idea,” she said. “Not just against political action, like an ‘enemies list’ kind of situation, but also against the Chinese, the Russians, and other hackers coming in and getting one big honeypot of information about all Americans.”

And that’s at the core of what the EFF is trying to do. It is, at heart, an organization that seeks to mitigate the risks of an unbridled rush into new technologies without considering the consequences. That so many technology firms and luminaries, including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, continue to support the organization financially is a testament to its enduring relevance.

For years, the EFF has been warning about the dangers of data harvesting on individuals. This, Cohn explained, was brought into sharp relief when the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022 and women found themselves facing being targeted and arrested for exercising their reproductive rights.

“There were suddenly a tremendous number of people who thought they were safe against government surveillance and government prosecution who suddenly weren’t,” she said.

“They found that their Facebook instant messages were being used to prosecute them, that their text message circles with their friends were being used to try to figure out that their searches were going to be used in a court of law to try to demonstrate that they had violated the law, which wasn’t the law a year ago.”

There’s also the ongoing fight over encryption, an issue that was key to the EFF’s foundation during the first crypto wars. Governments are still trying to insist on backdooring encryption, although the US government, after years of trying, seems to have come to its senses on the issue. The problem, Cohn opined, is that once you break encryption, there’s no telling if someone else will find the installed backdoors.

Not that politicians of either stripe can be relied upon, she said. When Obama was running for president in 2008, he was very vocal on the issue of Klein’s revelations on the stump, but when he got into government all the rhetoric stopped, Cohn told us. Once in office, he didn’t challenge the retroactive immunity telcos had been given for breaking the law.

It didn’t used to be this way, she added. After the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, the US enacted real reforms to protect privacy and rein in the intelligence services. Since then there has been a gradual erosion of these laws to the point where many of them are almost useless at covering the rights they were supposed to protect.

Surrender is not in our creed

While that might seem to be a hopeless situation, that’s an attitude we need to fight. Cohn said that there’s a feeling of “learned helplessness” that people fall into and accept the status quo. That’s not a trap citizens should let themselves fall into, she suggested, and organizations like the EFF are here to carry on the struggle.

“There are two options,” she told us. “There’s lose now, or fight and maybe lose later. And if you think there’s a third way where, like not fighting and it’ll all work out fine, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. This is just where we are, and we have to convince more people in the world about the value of due process, rule of law, and human rights.”

To that end, the EFF has a staff of highly skilled lawyers, many of whom gave up highly paid jobs in industry to join the nonprofit on a fraction of their old wages. They fight on important issues such as abuse of copyright, help with privacy legal cases, and have the backs of whistleblowers who bring forward evidence of illegal abuse of data.

While not a fan of Julian Assange on a personal basis, he did do important work in exposing government misconduct, Cohn said. Snowden learned from this and released more data that showed the extent of government surveillance. Whistleblowing is vital to exposing such cases, she commented, since the perpetrators of illegal activities aren’t just going to volunteer evidence of their actions.

The organization also employs technologists to build tools such as Privacy Badger, a simple browser plugin that blocks data harvesting, and maintains the Atlas of Surveillance, a searchable map that lets anyone in the US see what technologies their government is using to gather data on them.

“I think we’ve tried to really think about our three pillars of free speech, privacy, and innovation as the things that, if we can protect them, might not make a perfect internet, but we’ll make one that is a lot better than the one that would otherwise happen,” she said. “That has been our North Star all along.” ®

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