But was this just a “hacker defense fund” (as a dumbfounded Wall Street Journal called Kapor’s new project) or a legitimate new group tackling serious constitutional issues? By the end of that year, the trial of a hacker named Craig Neidorf (a/k/a “Knight Lightning”), who was accused of publishing the stolen information about the inner workings of BellSouth’s 911 protocols in his online ’zine, Phrack, erased all doubt. In it, the brains at EFF advised Neidorf’s attorneys and helped assemble witnesses on his behalf, eventually saving him from a 31-year prison sentence — while simultaneously making the feds look like complete and utter rubes.

From that point on the EFF, from its headquarters on Second Street in Cambridge, grew apace. “In the start-up phase, we were very effective at putting questions and issues on the table that had never been articulated,” says Kapor. “For instance, the idea that the Bill of Rights extends into cyberspace, at least for Americans. Nobody had conceived of these issues. Nobody had spoken about issues involving security and computer networks and access and rights and civil liberties in the same sentence. Not the ACLU, they were nowhere. Because this was all strange, technical, not mainstream. They just didn’t know. Nobody knew.”

But within a few years, the EFF’s goals extended a bit beyond their reach. In 1993, they moved their offices to Washington, DC, with an eye to influencing policy right at the source. That was a mistake. “We were organizationally just not up to the challenge,” says Kapor. “We were idealistic and naive. And we wound up getting very burned. So the organization beat a retreat to San Francisco to lick its wounds and gather itself together in the mid ’90s.”

After a years-long interregnum, which Kapor describes as “sort of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, in which EFF was more marginal, less effective, less clear in its mission and identity, and had multiple near-death experiences,” the renaissance began in earnest. Shari Steele, who had been the junior attorney when the EFF was in Washington, ascended to the executive-director position in 2000. “She renewed its sense of mission and purpose,” says Kapor. “And now it really is following the trajectory of being the ACLU of cyberspace.”

Battle with the RIAA
The EFF subsists entirely on donations. And while its membership of 10,000 or so is leaps and bounds above where it was 15 years ago, it’s still paltry compared with the ACLU’s 400,000 dues-paying members. But with low overhead and a lot of pro bono help, the EFF has influenced a remarkable array of issues.

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Unquestionably, a big bump in EFF’s stock came in 2003, when the RIAA started handing down its lawsuits against hundreds of people who used peer-to-peer technology. Suddenly, protection from the legal dragnet was needed. And while the EFF couldn’t prevent P2P users from having to settle out of court with the RIAA, it was a valuable information resource; it also offered legal services to people wrongly accused, brought the Grokster case all the way to the Supreme Court, wrote white paper after white paper about the issue’s ramifications, and even devised its own collective licensing scheme, “A Better Way Forward,” that offers a realistic alternative to copyright laws that are clearly obsolete in the digital age.

Worcester’s Nick Reveille, co-founder of P2P advocacy group Downhill Battle and the open-source software collaborative the Participatory Culture Foundation, has worked with EFF for years. They advised Downhill Battle of their legal rights when they defied EMI and made DJ Dangermouse’s Jay Z/Beatles mash-up, The Grey Album, available to millions online for 24 hours on “Grey Tuesday,” two Februaries ago. And Downhill Battle and EFF worked together on a campaign to protest the Induce Act, a broad and flawed bill which would potentially overturn the Betamax decision and stifle technological innovation and fair-use laws. (They co-sponsored a “Save Betamax” call-in day, swamping congressional offices with calls about what most politicians figured was an obscure issue.) Downhill Battle and EFF are two very different groups who work in different ways toward the same goals.

“There’s a generation growing up that’s totally comfortable with everything in digital form,” says Reveille. “Copying, sharing, remixing, reconfiguring. But your rights to do that are under constant attack. Media corporations want to force you to go through their channels all the time. But the EFF are the line of defense for the public against corporations that are constantly overreaching on copyright and trying to expand their influence over what the public can do.”

The next ACLU?
If the Electronic Frontier Foundation won’t actually become the American Civil Liberties Union of the 21st Century, it will certainly continue to be a crucial defender of our rights, especially in areas the ACLU may not be as well equipped to handle.

While the EFF and the ACLU work together often, says Steele, “one of the key things that’s different about us from the ACLU is that we actually have technologists on staff. What tends to happen for a lot of these tech issues is we’re usually about 18 months or maybe even two years ahead of the ACLU, except for the ones where maybe we inform them and let them know, or ones that are very obviously traditional, like anonymity online.