Thank you to the Destination Linux podcast, audience, and community for supporting EFF and the fight for digital rights!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF’s work to protect your rights on the internet is supported by over 30,000 members. Whatever causes you fight for, EFF protects the internet infrastructure you rely on to do so.
help us fight in court, in congress, and in code
To learn more about our work, follow EFF on social media and subscribe to our twice-monthly EFFector newsletter and EFFector podcast. And don't miss our five-season, award-winning "How to Fix the Internet" podcast, over curious conversations with some of the leading minds in law and technology.
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Join us at an upcoming event in person or online! RSVP for the next livestream in our EFFecting Change Q&A series: If You Own It, Why Can't You Fix It? Winning Back the Right to Repair, with Adam Savage and iFixit's Kyle Wiens.
Take Action
Help us fight age verification and other threats to online rights! If you're in the U.S, please visit EFF's Action Center today to tell your Congressmembers to oppose the KIDS Act.
In California? We need your help at the state level! Help us explain the problems with California’s Social Media Ban (A.B. 1709) bill. We are organizing speakers to give short testimony about why they oppose the bill. Reach out to rin@eff.org if you are interested; say the Destination Linux podcast sent you. And tell your your state lawmaker to oppose AB 1709 today!
Other Ways to Help
Cooperating Technologists: EFF is often contacted by attorneys or members of the general public who have a need for technical assistance. If you have a background in engineering, computer science, security, network administration, or open source technology—Join EFF's Cooperating Technologist Email List! And see other ways to volunteer here.
Employer Matching Contributions: Many employers sponsor matching gift programs and will match any charitable contributions or volunteer hours made by their employees. To find out if your company has a matching gift policy, you can look up your employer's name here.
Corporate Sponsorships: If your business or employer believes in a free and open web, there are opportunities to join our movement for a better technological future through corporate gifts and event sponsorships. Contact tierney@eff.org and learn more here.
EFF's History
Since 1990 EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists have been working on the cutting edge of technology and civil liberties. In early 1990, the U.S. Secret Service conducted raids tracking the distribution of a document illegally copied from a telecom company’s computer; one of those targeted was an Austin, TX publisher named Steve Jackson, whose computers were seized but later returned without any charges filed. Jackson’s business had suffered, and he discovered that the government had read and deleted his customers’ emails. He sought a civil liberties organization to represent him for this violation of his rights, but no existing organization understood the technology well enough to grasp the free speech and privacy issues at hand.
But a few well-informed technologists did understand. Mitch Kapor, former president of Lotus Development Corp.; John Perry Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, decided to do something about it – and so the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born in July 1990. The Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one for the early internet: For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls.
EFF's original logo, in use from 1990-2018
EFF continued to take on cases that set important precedents for the treatment of rights in cyberspace. In our second big case, Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, the United States government prohibited a University of California mathematics Ph.D. student from publishing online an encryption program he had created. Years earlier, the government had placed encryption on the United States Munitions List, alongside bombs and flamethrowers, as a weapon to be regulated for national security purposes; our lawsuit established that written software code is speech protected by the First Amendment, and the further ruled that the export control laws on encryption violated Bernstein's rights by prohibiting his constitutionally protected speech. Now everyone has the right to "export" encryption software—by publishing it on the Internet—without prior permission from the U.S. government.
Since then we’ve fought against government and corporate abuses of our Constitutional rights, on issues including warrantless wiretapping by intelligence agencies, the panopticon of street-level surveillance that seeks to track everything we do, and the corporate surveillance that turns our clicks into their commodity, as well as issues of antitrust and intellectual property, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and much more. We are lawyers, technologists, activists, and lobbyists who work every day for the privacy, security and dignity of all who use technology - and if you use technology, this fight is yours, too.
EFF's Greatest Hits
While many early battles over the right to communicate freely and privately stemmed from government censorship, today EFF is fighting for users on many other fronts as well.
Today, powerful corporations are attempting to shut down online speech, prevent new innovation from reaching consumers, and facilitating government surveillance. We challenge corporate overreach just as we challenge government abuses of power.
We also develop technologies that can help individuals protect their privacy and security online, which our technologists build and release freely to the public for anyone to use.
EFF's 35+ years of impactful work is hard to summarize, but we've put together a 'Greatest Hits' catalog: "Now That's What I Call Digital Rights!
Thanks to Ryan and Jill from Destination Linux for their longtime support of EFF's work! <3
