History

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow. The founders met through the online service The WELL.

The creation of the organization was motivated by the unlawful raid on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service as part of Operation Sundevil. Its second big case was Bernstein v. United States led by Cindy Cohn, where programmer and professor Daniel Bernstein sued the government for permission to publish his encryption software, Snuffle, and a paper describing it. More recently the organization has been involved in defending Edward Felten, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov.

The organization was originally located at Mitch Kapor's K.E.I. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the fall of 1993, the main EFF offices were housed in Washington, D.C., headed up by Jerry Berman. During this time, some of EFF's attention focused on the business of influencing national policy, a worthy business, but one perhaps not entirely palatable to parts of the organization. In 1994, Mr. Berman parted ways with EFF and formed the Center for Democracy and Technology. EFF moved offices across town, where Drew Taubman briefly took the reigns as director. In 1995, under the auspices of director Lori Fena, after some downsizing and in an effort to regroup and refocus on their base support, the organization moved offices to San Francisco, California. There, it took up temporary residence at John Gilmore's Toad Hall, and soon afterward moved into the Hamm's building at 1550 Bryant St. After Fena moved onto the EFF board of directors for a while, the organization was led by Tara Lemmey. Just prior to the EFF's move into its new and present offices at 454 Shotwell St. in SF's Mission District, long-time EFF Legal Director Shari Steele became, and remains as of mid-2005, the Executive Director.

Books & References

John Gilmore, founder EFFBooks that cover EFF's history in-depth from a policy and legal cases perspective include:

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