Log on. Check your Gmail. Click the URLs your friend just sent. One’s a blog entry about electronic voting machines, the other is a news story about warrantless wiretapping. Grit your teeth. Go to Google. Type in “DNC.” Use your credit card to fork over a few bucks to the first site that pops up. Toggle over to SuicideGirls.com. Maybe there are new pics from that model, the one with the dragon tattoo and the pierced everything. There aren’t. But there is a new Gorillaz/White Stripes mash-up on GYBO.org. Get it. A new Kanye remix at Digital Eargasm. Download that too. (MP3s are all you use for music these days, ever since that Bad Plus CD left that fucking rootkit stuff on your hard drive last fall — Suspicious Activity, indeed.) Scan the headlines on The Onion. Print out an article to read on the subway. You don’t notice the faint grid of tiny yellow dots on the edge of the page.
You may or may not recognize the risks in these quick and ostensibly innocuous visits with your laptop. Or the tenuous legality of some of the commonplace activities performed therein. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) does. And as more and more of our lives are spent online, its crusade to safeguard our freedoms in the digital age is all the more important. From file-sharing and fair use to electronic surveillance and online anonymity, the EFF (based in San Francisco, after stints in Cambridge and DC) has been at the forefront of battles that shape our online experience. It’s been around since before the Internet was in common use, and as we enter the age of “Internet 2.0,” with the Web’s power and reach only growing, EFF’s importance will do the same.
“We have a critical mass of people who are using pretty sophisticated technology as a part of their everyday life, and in fact relying on it,” says Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director. “And that’s starting to raise all sorts of interesting questions.”
“So much of what we do is now electronic,” says EFF executive director and president Shari Steele. “Unless there are groups like ours out there, being watchdogs for what’s happening in the world of technology, we’re going to lose our rights before most people even realize that anything has happened.”
Taking on the heavyweights
For an organization with just 22 members — primarily lawyers, tech specialists, policy analysts, and activists — and a budget of just more than $2.5 million, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has its fingers in a lot of pies. Just scroll down the list of topics on the right side of its homepage. Biometrics. Bloggers’ rights. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). E-voting. Patents. Privacy. Spam. Surveillance. The EFF is a gimlet-eyed observer of technological developments, speaking out when technology both is used to infringe on our rights (the Justice Department’s recent subpoena of Google’s search records) and itself is infringed on (the RIAA’s war against file-sharing.) And it doesn’t just bark, it bites.
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.”
