Last Tuesday, for instance, the EFF filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T in federal district court, accusing the telco giant of violating the law by supplying the National Security Agency access to two of its databases in collaboration with the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic wiretapping. The outcome of that case remains to be seen, of course, but it’s only the latest in a long series of bold and usually successful legal gambits. Acting either as counsel, amicus, or litigant and using its own eight staff lawyers or pro bono help from a network of sympathetic legal eagles, the EFF has racked up an impressive string of victories against some formidable foes, such MGM and Diebold.
EFF has also jumped headlong into the “rootkit” fiasco, filing a class-action suit against Sony BMG demanding that it repair the egregious computer-security flaws caused by the digital-rights-management technology it had secreted onto millions of CDs. (EFF was also one of the only groups crying foul about the grossly overreaching licensing terms in the End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs), upon which use of those CDs was contingent.) Sony agreed to a settlement, approved last month.
When the rootkit story broke in November, EFF staffers were disgusted, but not surprised. “We had been saying for years, even before the DMCA, that we were very concerned about overreaching DRM and all the problems it would bring,” says Cindy Cohn. “We were really tempted to say, ‘told you so.’”
The EFF, after all, is well-versed in the nefarious steps corporations and governments often take to restrict new technologies and keep tabs on the people who use them. Which is why they weren’t all that shocked last October when, following up on a dropped dime about some strange yellow dots, all but invisible to the naked eye, that appear on pages run through color laser printers, they discovered that the faint 15 x 8 grids were actually tracking codes that can be used by the government to trace documents back to their source. “It’s the kind of thing that gives a lot of people the creeps,” says Cohn with considerable understatement. “The fact that companies are creating a tracking system surreptitiously struck us as something the public ought to know about.”
Sleuthing like that represents just a small sliver of EFF’s work. Litigation and litigation support comprise the lion’s share of the group’s labors, roughly 60 percent. The remainder of its resources go toward advocacy work — letter-writing campaigns, congressional call-ins — and the dogged attending of meetings, here and abroad, where global standards for new software and digital media are set. “We sit in the room while the designs are being made, and make sure they’re taking into account the various principles of openness and not taking away people’s rights,” says Steele. Perhaps unsurprisingly, EFF representatives aren’t always the most welcome guests in the corridors of corporate power. They like it that way.
New rules for a new world
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
