EFF Turns Sweet Sixteen

San Francisco--In March 1990, when the Internet was just a whisper on the lips of geeks and dungeon masters, the Secret Service raided the offices of Texas game board maker Steve Jackson. Searching for copies of an illegal document authorities feared could cripple the nation's 911 emergency system, agents seized all of Jackson's electronic equipment and files containing a book he was about to publish. They had no idea who they were fucking with.

After finding no trace of what was called the E911 document, the agency returned Jackson's property. To his dismay, Jackson discovered that Secret Service agents had accessed, read and deleted all of his computer files including private employee and customer e-mails.

Steve Jackson Games was all but in ruins. He had had to lay off many of his employees and the deadline for his book publishing deal had come and gone.

Certain that his civil rights had been violated, Jackson turned to Mitch Kapor, John Barlow and John Gilmore, online pioneers who were already keeping a close watch on civil liberties and new technologies.

And so, sixteen years ago this Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born.

The group filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service and eventually won. The court determined that the government had no business reading private e-mails and gave e-mails the same privacy protection as telephone calls.

For the past sixteen years, the EFF has continued to tirelessly defend our civil rights in the sphere of online technology.

Their latest lawsuit accuses AT&T of cooperating with the National Security Agency in providing access to American's telephone and Internet communications without legal authority. Last month the EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that the government needs a warrant to collect the content of a telephone call.

"We have shown that AT&T is diverting traffic wholesale to the NSA," said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl. "It is not a secret, and [there] is no reason to deny AT&T customers the opportunity to show the court that this dragnet surveillance program violates the law and their privacy rights."

"It is quite possibly the most important privacy and free speech issue in the 21st century," said EFF attorney Kevin Bankston. "We are trying to force the government to follow the law. We are trying to force the phone company to follow the law."

The EFF & Pornography

As I said in the very first PornTribe post back in March, the reason for treating pornography as protected speech is not just because it's so damn great to watch, but because it keeps the censors at bay when it comes to more "important" forms of political and social dissent.

The folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation appear to agree.

In the mid-nineties a barrage of censorious legislation made its way through congress.

The Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 instituted severe criminal penalties for publishing obscene content online; content that the government had no legal authority to prohibit offline.

The EFF, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, sued to block the enforcement of the CDA which led to the Supreme Court ruling the law unconstitutional in 1997.

In 1998 Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) which provided severe criminal penalties for the "commercial" distribution of "material harmful to minors."

Again, the EFF and the ACLU rallied together, this time filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law. According to their website, the EFF focused their case on the vague language of the law. They also claimed that it attempted to force adults to give up their right to read what they chose and allow the most conservative jurisdiction in the country to set the "decency" standards for all Web content nationally.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court (Ashcroft v. ACLU), which eventually found COPA unconstitutional.

In the Court's opinion:

"Content-based prohibitions, enforced by severe criminal penalties, have the constant potential to be a repressive force in the lives and thoughts of a free people. To guard against that threat the Constitution demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid, and that the Government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality."

Right fucking on! Good job, guys and Happy Birthday!

The EFF is a non-profit advocacy group based in San Francisco. They rely heavily on individual donations to continue their great work. If you'd like to donate or get involved, click on the first EFF link above. Or, if that's too much to ask, then this one.