The Electronic Frontier Foundation ================================== 1550 Bryant Street, Suite 725 San Francisco CA 94103 USA +1 415 436 9333 (voice) +1 415 436 9993 (fax) Internet: ask@eff.org The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Virtual Communities ========================================================== By Mike Godwin Introduction by Howard Rheingold -------------------------------- Mike Godwin is the staff counsel for The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF has been established to help civilize the electronic frontier; to make it truly useful and beneficial to everyone, not just an elite; and to do this in a way that is in keeping with our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication. EFF and Virtual Communities --------------------------- The Electronic Frontier Foundation is living proof of the existence and effectiveness of virtual digital communities. Not only did EFF arise from the interactions of citizens who were, and are, "neighbors" in electronic communities, but the EFF has also gone on to establish its own communities, not the least of which is the EFF conference on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). The WELL was a key community from the beginning. The way communities normally shape their responses to outside events is for neighbors to chat - perhaps even gossip Q over the fence. It was this kind of informal exchange of information that led to two crystallizing events behind EFF's formation. The first was an online WELL conference on "hacking" sponsored by Harper's magazine. One result of that conference was that WELL user and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow met and befriended a couple of hackers who went by the cyberpunkish noms-de-hack "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik." Although they "knew" each other electronically, Barlow's face-to-face meeting with Acid and Optik was a revelation: "Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and fashionably clad," Barlow later wrote. "They looked to be as dangerous as ducks." Barlow soon concluded that law enforcement's characterization of these hackers as major computer criminals was disproportionate to their actions, which had more to do with intellectual curiosity and youthful exploration than with genuine criminal intent. The second crystallizing event occurred when Barlow and another WELL user, Mitch Kapor (a founder of Lotus Development Corp. and On Technology) compared notes about their respective visits by FBI agents. The agents were investigating the unauthorized copying and distribution of Apple's proprietary source code for the ROMs in Apple's Macintosh computer, and both Kapor and Barlow were startled by how little the FBI seemed to know about the nature of the alleged crimes they were investigating, and Barlow later published an account of the visit on the WELL (and print-published as "Crime and Puzzlement" in WER #68). As Barlow later writes in the March issue of the Foundation's print newsletter, the EFFector: "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.... 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 [the agents' visits] 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." Having met in person when Barlow interviewed Kapor for Microtimes, the two future EFF co-founders had used the WELL to build on their face-to-face contact. In effect, they had become next-door neighbors, although Barlow lived in Pinedale, Wyoming, while Kapor lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. Says Barlow: "There was a sense that what was going on was a threat to our community." So Barlow and Kapor did what neighbors often do in response to a neighborhood problem - they formed a citizens' group. In this case, the citizens' group was the EFF. I had a chance to play my own role in another example of such concerned citizen action in my then-hometown, Austin, Texas, which has more than its share of computer bulletin-board systems (BBSs). On March 1, 1990, one of those BBSs was seized by the United States Secret Service, which claimed at the time that the system, run by the Austin-based role-playing game company Steve Jackson Games. Although neither Jackson nor his company turned out to be the targets of the Secret Service's criminal investigation, Jackson was told that the manual for a role-playing game they were about to publish (called GURPS Cyberpunk and stored on the hard disk of the company's BBS computer) was a "handbook for computer crime." Austin's BBS community was startled, then outraged, by the seizure, which had the potential of putting Jackson, an innocent third party, out of business. On a BBS called "Flight" there was a hot debate about the media's failure to pick up on Jackson's story. A third-year law student and former journalist and Flight user, I theorized on Flight that the media hadn't covered the story because they didn't know about it. Or, at least, they didn't understand the issues. So, to test my theory, I gathered together several postings from local BBSs and from Usenet, the distributed BBS that runs on the Internet and connected computers, and trekked down to the Austin American-Statesman office to talk to a friend of mine, Kyle Pope, who covered computer-related stories. I also took him photocopies of the statutes that give the Secret Service jurisdiction over computer crime and lots of phone numbers of potential sources. At the same time, I called and modemed materials to John Schwartz, a friend and former colleague who was now an editor at Newsweek. Pope's lengthy, copyrighted story on the Secret Service seizure appeared in the American-Statesman the following weekend. John Schwartz's story, which covered the Steve Jackson Games incident as well as the Secret Service's involvement in a nationwide computer-crime "dragnet," appeared in Newsweek's April 30 issue. The heavy-handed tactics and overbroad seizure at Steve Jackson Games became a symbol of the law-enforcement community's misconceptions and fears about young computer hackers, and provided a context for Barlow's and Kapor's discussions about creating the EFF. Once they agreed on what needed to be done, Kapor and Barlow went back to the WELL and drew upon the collective wisdom of that community for input into the tactics and strategy of the newly formed foundation. The same week they announced the EFF's formation in Washington, D.C., they started the EFF conference on the WELL - sort of a community within a community which quickly became one of the system's most active conferences. Soon afterward, they created two new newsgroups on Usenet -- comp.org.eff.news and comp.org.eff.talk. The latter newsgroup, like all active newsgroups, has become a community of sorts itself, with a diverse collection of voices addressing -- sometimes heatedly -- the issues that arise as we proceed to explore and civilize the electronic frontier. Almost immediately after the foundation was officially launched, EFF's efforts to assist in the defense of electronic publisher Craig Neidorf had tangible results. Neidorf had been prosecuted for publishing a BellSouth text file relating to the E-911 system (see "Attacks on the Bill of Rights," WER #70). EFF's law firm, Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky, Lieberman, submitted an amicus curiae brief defending Neidorf's First Amendment rights as a publisher. We also helped Neidorf's defense counsel assemble experts to testify on his client's behalf. And a member of the WELL's EFF conference came up with the information that was critical in persuading the prosecutors to drop their case. It's clear that EFF is not only the product of electronic communities, but has also produced some new communities while continuing to contribute to old ones. It's also clear that the sense of community was seeded by face-to-face contact at key points: when Barlow met Acid and Optik, for example, and when he interviewed Kapor. The need for at least occasional face-to-face contact, Kapor still stresses, means that current networks and BBSs don't simply create community; instead, they amplify it. Or, to be even more accurate, the two phenomena exist in a complex state of coevolution, with face-to-face contacts fueling the electronic relationships (and vice versa). One of the things you often see when you read discussions about EFF on the WELL or on Usenet is a sense that the EFF has become a representative body. While this is misleading - EFF is not yet a membership organization - it's still the case that EFF is regarded as an advocacy group for electronic communities generally. You'll often read comments from Usenet folks who think the most appropriate pronouns when talking about the EFF are "we," "us," and "our." And if that neighborly sense of belonging doesn't prove the existence of a community, I don't know what does.
