The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998/hackers_encyclopedia.iso/zines/eff/effhstry.txt

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A Not Terribly Brief History
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

by John Perry Barlow

Thursday, November 8, 1990


The Electronic Frontier Foundation was started by a visit from the FBI.

In late April of 1990, I got a call from Special Agent Richard Baxter of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation.  He asked if he could come by the next
day and discuss a certain investigation with me.  His unwillingness to
discuss its nature over the phone left me with a sense of global guilt, but I
figured turning him down would probably send the wrong signal.

On Mayday, he drove to Pinedale, Wyoming, a cow town 100 miles north
of his Rock Springs office (where he ordinarily investigates livestock theft
and other regional crimes).  He brought with him a thick stack of
documents from the San Francisco office and a profound confusion about
their contents.

He had been sent to find out if I might be a member of the NuPrometheus
League, a dread band of info-terrorists (or maybe just a disaffected former
Apple employee) who had stolen and wantonly distributed source code
normally used in the Macintosh ROMs.  Agent Baxter's errand was
complicated by a fairly complete unfamiliarity with computer technology.
I realized right away that before I could demonstrate my innocence, I
would first have to explain to him what guilt might be.

The three hours I passed doing this were surreal for both of us. Whatever
this source code stuff was, and whatever it was that happened to it, had
none of the cozy familiarity of a few yearling steers headed across the
Wyoming border in the wrong stock truck.

What little he did know, thanks to the San Francisco office, was also pretty
well out of kilter.  He had been told, for example, that Autodesk, the
publisher of AutoCAD, was a major Star Wars defense contractor and that
its CEO was none other than John Draper, the infamous phone phreak
also known as Cap'n Crunch.  As soon as I quit laughing, I started to
worry.

I realized in the course of this interview that I was seeing, in microcosm,
the entire law enforcement structure of the United States. Agent Baxter
was hardly alone in his puzzlement about the legal, technical, and
metaphorical nature of datacrime.

I also found in his struggles a framework for understanding a series of
recent Secret Service raids on some young hackers I'd met in a Harper's
magazine forum on computers and freedom.  And it occurred to me that
this might be the beginning of a great paroxysm of governmental
confusion during which everyone's liberties would become at risk.

When Agent Baxter had gone, I wrote an account of his visit and placed it
on the WELL, a computer BBS in Sausalito which is  digital home to a
large collection of technically hip folks, including Mitch Kapor, the father
of Lotus 1-2-3.

Turns out Mitch had also been visited by the FBI, owing to his having
unaccountably received of one of the source code disks which
NuPrometheus scattered around.  Mitch's experience had been as
dreamlike as mine.  He had, in fact, filed the whole thing under General
Inexplicability until he read my tale on the WELL.  Now he had enough
corroboration for his own strange sense of alarm to begin acting on it.

Several days later, he found his bizjet about to fly over Wyoming on its
way to San Francisco.  He called me from somewhere over South Dakota
and asked if he might literally drop in for a chat about Agent Baxter and
related matters.

So, while a late spring snow storm swirled outside my office, we spent
several hours hatching what became the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I
told him about the sweep of Secret Service raids which had taken place
several months before and their apparent disregard for the Bill of Rights.

Alarmed, he gave me the phone number of Harvey Silverglate, whose
willingness to champion unpopular causes was demonstrated by his
current defense of Leona Helmsley.  He said that Harvey would probably
know if this were as bad as it was starting to sound.  He also said that he
would be willing to pay the bills that generally start to appear whenever
you call a lawyer.

I finally found Harvey in the New York offices of Rabinowitz, Boudin,
Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman, a firm whose long list of successfully
defended liberties includes the Pentagon Papers case.  I told him and Eric
Lieberman what I knew about recent government flailings against
cybercrime.  They were even less sanguine than I had been.

The next day a trio code-named Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik, and Scorpion
entered the walnut-panelled chambers of Rabinowitz, Boudin and told
their tales to a young lawyer there named Terry Gross.  While EFF as a
formal organization would not exist for another two months, its legal arm
was already flexing its muscle.

A few days later I received a phone call from the technology writer for the
Washington Post.  He was interested in following up on the Harper's
forum, and knew nothing of Mitch's and my joint endeavors.  I filled him
in, hoping to expose the Secret Service.  Several days later, the Post
published the first of many newspaper stories, all of which could have
shared the same headline: LOTUS FOUNDER DEFENDS HACKERS.

While this was an irritating misrepresentation...we were more interested
in defending the Constitution than any digital miscreants...the publicity
produced a couple of major supporters:  Steve Wozniak, who called and
offered an unlimited match to Mitch's contributions, and John Gilmore
(Sun Microsystems employee #5) who e-mailed me a six figure offer of
support.

Meanwhile, the list of apparent outrages lengthened.  We learned about
an Austin role-playing games publisher named Steve Jackson whose office
equipment had been confiscated by the Secret Service in an apparent effort
to restrain his publication of a game called Cyberpunk which they thought,
with ludicrous inaccuracy, to be " a handbook for computer crime.

All over the country computer bulletins being confiscated, undelivered e-
mail and all.  A Secret Service dragnet called Operation Sundevil seized
more than 40 computers and 23,000 data disks from teenagers in 14
American cities, using levels of force and terror which would have been
more appropriate to the apprehension of urban guerrillas than barely post-
pubescent computer nerds.

And there was the Craig Neidorf case.  Neidorf, also known by the nom de
crack Knight Lightning, had published an internal BellSouth document in
his electronic magazine Phrack.  For this constitutionally protected act,
Neidorf was being charged with interstate transport of stolen property
with a possible sentence of 60 years in jail and a $122,000 in fines.

I wrote a piece about these events called Crime & Puzzlement.  Although I
did so at the request of the Whole Earth Review...it made its first print
appearance in the Fall 1990 issue of WER...I " published"  it on the Net in
June and was astonished by the response.  It was like planting a fence-post
and discovering that the " ground"  into which you've driven it is actually
the back of a giant animal which quivers and heaves at the irritation.

By July, I was receiving up to 100 e-mail messages a day.  They came from
all over the planet and expressed nearly universal indignation.  I began to
experience datashock, but I also realized that Mitch and I were not alone in
our concerns.  We had struck a chord.

In Cambridge, Mitch was having something like the same experience.
Since the Washington Post story, he found himself bathed in media glare.
However, the more he learned about ambiguous nature of law in
Cyberspace, the more of his considerable intellectual and financial
resources he became willing to devote to the subject.

In late June, Mitch and I threw several dinners in San Francisco, to which
we invited major figures from the computer industry.  We weren't
surprised to learn than many of them had exploits in their past which,
undertaken today, would arouse plenty of Secret Service interest.  It
appeared possible that one side-effect of current government practices
might be the elimination of the next generation of computer
entrepreneurs and digital designers.

It also became clear that we were dealing with a set of problems which was
a great deal more complex and far-reaching than a few cases of
governmental confusion. The actions of the FBI and Secret Service were
symptoms of a growing social crisis: Future Shock.  America was entering
the Information Age with neither laws nor metaphors for the appropriate
protection and conveyance of information itself.

We realized that our legal actions on behalf of a few teen-age crackers
would go on indefinitely without much result unless something were
done to ease social tensions along the electronic frontier.  The real task at
hand was the civilization of Cyberspace.  Such an undertaking would
require more juice and stamina than two men could muster, even
amplified by the Net and a solid financial supply.  We would need some
kind of organizational identity.

With this in mind, we hired a press coordinator, Cathy Cook (who had
formerly done PR for Steve Jobs), set a squad of lawyers to work on
investigating the proper organizational tax status, and, over a San
Francisco dinner with Stewart Brand, Nat Goldhaber, Jaron Lanier, and
Chuck Blanchard, we selected a name and defined a mission.

We announced the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the
National Press Club on July 10.  Mitch and I were joined for the
announcement by Harvey Silverglate, Terry Gross, and Steve Jackson.

We were also joined by Marc Rotenberg of the Washington office of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.  One of our first official
acts had been to grant that organization $275,000 for a project on
computing and civil liberties.  CPSR would keep a wary eye on
developments " inside the Beltway"  and work in conjunction with
congressional staffers to see that any legislation dealing with access to
information was sensibly drafted.

While in Washington, we also took inventory of the terrain, meeting
with congressional staffers, the Washington civil liberties establishment,
and officials from the Library of Congress and the White House.  The area
to be covered, from intellectual property to telecommunications policy to
law enforcement technique, was daunting, as were the ambient levels of
confusion and indifference.

We also generated an enormous amount of press.  And it became apparent
that not everyone was persuaded of our cause.  Business Week called Mitch
naive for his willingness to believe that computer crackers were somehow
less dangerous that drug kingpins.  Various burghers of the computer
establishment, ranging from the executive director of the Software
Publishers Association to a columnist for ComputerWorld, called us fools
at best and, more likely, dangerous fools.

The Wall Street Journal printed a particularly hysterical piece which alleged
that the document Craig Neidorf (into whose case we had entered a
supporting amicus brief) had published was a computer virus capable of
bringing down the emergency phone system for the entire country.  In fact,
the text file which Neidorf distributed dealt with the bureaucratic
procedures of 911 administration in the BellSouth region and contained
nothing which could be used to crack a system.  Indeed, it contained
nothing which could not be easily obtained through by legal means.

We persevered.  Our first major break came in late July.  Thanks in part to
the expertise of John Nagel, a witness we introduced to  Neidorf's lawyer,
the government was forced to abandon its case against Neidorf after 4 days
in Chicago's Federal Court.

Although our briefs supporting Neidorf's activities under the 1st
Amendment were not admitted, it became apparent, before such loftier
matters could even be broached, that the Secret Service had indicted him
with no clear understanding of the purpose or availability of the
document he had distributed.  Like Agent Baxter, they knew too little to
critically examine the misinformation they had been given by the
corporate masters, in this case, officials at Bellcore.

Following the resolution of the Neidorf case, and, to some extent because
of it, skepticism of EFF has moderated considerably.  If anything, the most
recent press accounts of our activities have been almost fulsome in their
praise.  Recent favorable coverage has appeared in the New York Times,
The Economist, Infoworld, Information Week, PCweek, and Boston
Magazine.

Since July, we have been absurdly busy on numerous fronts:  We've
worked on raising public awareness of the issues at stake.  We are
organizing legal responses to the original and continuing intemperance of
law enforcement. We have worked on the political front, developing and
lobbying for rational computer security legislation. We have started to
create a network of interested experts on computer security, intellectual
property, telecommunications policy, and international information
rights.  And lately we've been attending to the organizational demands of
the non-profit equivalent of a hyper-successful computer startup.

The following is a cursory digest of these activities.


The EFF in Public

We believe that critical to taming the electronic frontier is creating a sense
of the stakes among both the computer literate and the general public.  We
have combined public appearances, that incredibly blunt instrument, the
Media, and electronic interaction to cover a lot of consciousness since July.
It's a good thing Mitch has that airplane.

We have continued to build a constituency within the computing
community, convening small gatherings of computer professionals from
across the hacker/suit spectrum.  Mitch, Harvey, and I have also addressed
larger forums such as the CPSR Annual Meeting, the International
Information Integrity Institute meeting on computer security, the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
Academy of Science and Engineering, Stewart Alsop's Agenda '91,
MacHack, the Boston Computer Society, Ars Electronica, the Kennedy
School of Government, and numerous others.

We have done more press interviews and call-in radio shows than I can
remember.  Woz appeared on Good Morning America with Assistant
Arizona AG (and Operation Sundevil architect) Gail Thackeray.  EFF has
appeared prominently in national publications ranging from Newsweek to
Spin, most of the major daily newspapers, and nearly every computer trade
publication from Information Week to Mondo 2000.  A writer for The New
York Times Magazine is currently at work on a major piece about EFF.

I have agreed to write a regular column on the Electronic Frontier for the
Communications of the ACM.  And Mitch and I have been invited to
submit pieces to Scientific American, Issues in Science and Technology, and
Whole Earth Review.

We set up two Usenet newsgroups, comp.org.eff.news and
comp.org.eff.talk. eff.news is moderated by Glenn Tenney and contains a
selection of the best articles posted in eff.talk.  We began an EFF forum on
the WELL (which soon became among the most active conferences there,
right behind Sex and the Grateful Dead). We are setting up our own
USENET node on the Net, eff.org,  with a Sun IV in our Cambridge office
and the guidance of volunteer sysop Spike Ilacqua.  When fully
operational, the machine will run the Caucus conferencing system and
should have a 56kb Internet connection.  Finally, we are investigating the
possibility of setting up an EFF conference on Compuserve.

We have read and personally generated over 4 megabytes of e-mail since
June.  Lately, Jef Poskanzer has been maintaining  the EFF's electronic
mailing list, which is now approaching 1000 names.  Information
distributed through eff.news is also sent to the mailing list.

Concerned that our approach is a little too electronic, we are now trying to
connect more directly with folks who might be interested in EFF but who
are not online.  Our newsletter, the first edition of which you now have in
your hands, is part of that effort.  Primarily the work of Rick Doherty and
Dan Sokol, we intend to publish The EFFector a minimum of 4 times a
year