Electronic Frontier Foundation
From Powerbase
- Mitch Kapor, who left the corporate world after making millions as founder of Lotus Development Corp., started EFF in 1990 with John Perry Barlow, a wealthy Wyoming Libertarian who wrote a number of tunes for the Grateful Dead.
- The organization grew quickly after its launch in Cambridge, Mass., and established an office in Washington, where it hired a top ACLU lobbyist, Jerry Berman. It dove headfirst into persuading Congress to build individual rights and free speech into technology policy. But EFF's board members became disillusioned when they realized the level of compromise required in Washington.
- Barlow, who is still on the board, views EFF's Washington platform as a sellout. As much as 90 percent of the group's funding came from corporations at that time. Now, most of EFF's funding comes from private donors, and less than 10 percent from corporations -- a point of pride for EFF's leaders.
- "We were supported by the Direct Marketing Association," a group that EFF now fights over issues such as online privacy, Barlow said during a phone interview. With funding from Microsoft Corp. and other companies, the group could never have advocated limiting corporations' ability to protect their intellectual property, like it is now doing with the DVD case, he said. [1]
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