The EFF is founded in response to a raid on a tabletop game publisher

JUL 10 1990 · 12:00

Video: Cypherpunks Write Code - Complete Documentary Date: 1990-07-10 · Type: precursor · Tags: EFF, john-gilmore, john-perry-barlow, mitch-kapor, operation-sundevil, steve-jackson-games, 1990, bay-area Without the EFF the cypherpunks would have had brilliant code and no one to litigate it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was incorporated on 10 July 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in response to the U.S. Secret Service's Operation Sundevil and the March 1990 raid on Steve Jackson Games — a Texas tabletop publisher whose offices were searched, whose computers were seized, and whose forthcoming game GURPS Cyberpunk was confiscated as 'a handbook for computer crime.' The proximate cause was a Secret Service document leak, but the operation's scale — simultaneous raids in fourteen cities, 42 computers and 23,000 floppy disks seized — made clear that law enforcement had no framework for electronic property, electronic speech, or the distinction between a network and a weapon. Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus Development Corporation, by then very rich and very alarmed), John Perry Barlow (Wyoming rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, already writing about cyberspace for Wired's precursors), and John Gilmore (Sun Microsystems' fifth employee, full-time cypherpunk) put up the seed money and wrote the public charter document. Barlow's essay 'Crime and Puzzlement' in Whole Earth Review (Summer 1990) is the founding text; it reads now as the civic manifesto that preceded and enabled the technical manifestos Hughes and May would write two years later. The EFF's significance to the cypherpunk story is structural: it was the legal infrastructure the technical program required. The cypherpunks wrote code; the EFF litigated it. The Bernstein case, the PGP grand jury defense, the legal arguments around Mixmaster — all of these ran through the EFF's San Francisco offices. Gilmore's own aphorism, misattributed and mangled almost immediately upon publication in Time in December 1993 — 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' — has the same prophetic quality as May's manifesto, and the same problem: it described what the network would do, not what states would learn to do in response. Facts • Founded 10 July 1990, Cambridge, Massachusetts; later headquartered in San Francisco • Founders: Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore; Steve Wozniak and Stewart Brand on early board • Catalyst: 1 March 1990 Steve Jackson Games raid (Austin, TX) and Operation Sundevil sweeps (May 1990) • Barlow's 'Crime and Puzzlement' (Whole Earth Review, Summer 1990) is the public founding document • Gilmore's 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' published in Time, 6 December 1993 Primary Documents • EFF: A History of Protecting Freedom Where Law and Technology Collide — https://www.eff.org/about/history • Electronic Frontier Foundation — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation