Cyberspace has no real headquarters. But the people who are trying to protect our liberties in cyberspace live in a very real world.
So when the Electronic Frontier Foundation left Washington, D.C., for San Francisco about 2 1/2 years ago, policy-minded outsiders correctly wondered whether the organization was forfeiting its place at the policy table.
The EFF’s move came after an ugly internal battle, culminating in the departure of several top staffers who formed their own cyber-lobbying outfit. In its explanation for the move to California, the EFF said it had always been ambivalent about the Washington scene and wanted to be closer to “our natural constituency–Net-aware people–and further away from Washington Beltwaycentric thinking.” The group, its staff sharply cut, left one employee in the capital.
Even though the EFF (www.eff.org) clearly lost some of its influence inside the Beltway, it didn’t wither away. It slowly regrouped, and held onto a quality that as much as anything else attracted the organization’s new president and chief executive, whose appointment was announced earlier this month in San Francisco.
“The EFF is still the best brand name” in cyberspace civil liberties–a huge asset, notes Barry Steinhardt, who took over the EFF post after a stint as associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union and head of the ACLU’s Cyber-liberties Task force. Lori Fena, his predecessor, is the new chair of the board of directors, and Esther Dyson, who had chaired the group, will remain on the board.
Influence comes in many flavors. One is being in journalists’ Rolodexes, and being called when news happens. The ACLU has been a reliable “usual suspect” for reporters for decades on a variety of civil liberties matters, and the EFF–the first organization of its kind for cyberspace–won and kept a similar role on its own, more ephemeral turf. That isn’t the same thing as helping congressional staffers write the laws, but it’s real influence.
Influence is also having people visit your Web site when they wonder about the day’s vital issues. When regular folks get information from the EFF site or others like it–say, how to protect one’s privacy in cyberspace–they’re gaining personal power over their own lives.
And it’s not that the EFF has been snoozing in the past 30 months from a policy or activist standpoint. It was one of the key players in the successful challenge to the so-called Communications Decency Act, which led to a pivotal Supreme Court ruling that cyberspace deserved the same free-speech protections as any printed document.
In more recent activities the EFF has been instrumental in helping an Illinois mathematician fight for the right to publish and export encryption code, software used to scramble private messages so they stay that way. It was also a leader in the formation of an industry group called TrustE (www.truste.org), which encourages commercial on-line sites that collect personal information to disclose what, if anything, they will or won’t do with that information.
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The latter effort reflects the EFF’s recognition that some of the biggest decisions about cyberspace liberties are being made by private companies, not the government, Steinhardt and several board members pointed out. The push for Internet ratings systems are another example. The ACLU, EFF and other groups are deeply worried that future Web browsers will come with ratings systems turned on–and that those systems will be highly restrictive and contrary to the notion of free speech–rather than simply being available for consumers who want to screen what they may consider inappropriate material.