Defending liberties in high-tech world

By ANICK JESDANUN

updated 6:00 p.m. ET July 5, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO - In March 1990, when few people had even heard of the Internet, U.S. Secret Service agents raided the Texas offices of a small board-game maker, seizing computer equipment and reading customers' e-mail stored on one machine. A group of online pioneers already worried about how the nation's laws were being applied to new technologies became even more fearful and decided to intervene.

And thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born — 16 years ago this week — taking on the Secret Service as its first case, one the EFF ultimately won when a judge agreed that the government had no right to read the e-mails or keep the equipment.

Today, after expanding into such areas as intellectual property and moving its headquarters twice along with its focus, the EFF is re-emphasizing its roots of trying to limit government surveillance of electronic communications, while keeping a lookout for emerging threats even as the Internet and digital technologies become mainstream.

In one of its highest-profile lawsuits to date, the EFF has accused AT&T Inc. of illegally cooperating with the National Security Agency to make phone and Internet communications available without warrants.

"It's quite possibly the most important privacy and free speech issue in the 21st century," said Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union. "We are trying to force the government to follow the law. We are trying to force the phone company to follow the law."

Shari Steele, the EFF's executive director, described the NSA program as "a place where technology and civil liberties collide in a big way."

The EFF was born July 10, 1990, as three men who met on the online community The WELL grew concerned that the ACLU and other traditional civil-liberties organizations didn't understand technology enough to question government actions like the Secret Service raid.

"It's difficult at this stage of the game to remember how few people even knew the Internet existed," said John Perry Barlow, a co-founder who used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead. "It wasn't on their radar."

Even the World Wide Web wouldn't be invented for another five months.

Software pioneer Mitch Kapor, another co-founder, said that even when a group like the ACLU had the will, it didn't have the technical know-how to consider how basic, constitutional rights would even apply to the online world.

"Nobody had done the thinking," he said. "The questions hadn't been raised."

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