Welcome, Daily Show Viewers! Learn More About EFF and Privacy’s Defender

About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF’s work to protect your rights on the internet is supported by over 30,000 members who have joined our mission by donating just this year. JOIN EFF TODAY For over 35 years, our lawyers, activists, and technologists have been thinking about the next big thing in tech before anyone else—whether that’s age verification, AI, or Palantir. Whatever causes you fight for, you rely on the internet to do so. And EFF protects the infrastructure of rebellion.  To learn more about our work, follow EFF on social media and subscribe to EFF's EFFector newsletter below to learn about the ways the internet and online rights are changing and what that means for you. And join EFF to support our fight—because if you use technology, this fight is yours.  Privacy's Defender: My Thirty Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, by Cindy Cohn In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders. "Let's Sue the Government" T-Shirt [ Sometimes our supporters call EFF a merch store with a law firm attached because our stickers, hoodies and shirts are so well known. Our "Let's Sue the Government" shirt tells people: When your rights are at risk, you don’t stay quiet. EFF's History In early 1990, the U.S. Secret Service conducted raids tracking the distribution of a document illegally copied from a telecom company’s computer; one of those targeted was an Austin, TX publisher named Steve Jackson, whose computers were seized but later returned without any charges filed. Jackson’s business had suffered, and he discovered that the government had read and deleted his customers’ emails. He sought a civil liberties organization to represent him for this violation of his rights, but no existing organization understood the technology well enough to grasp the free speech and privacy issues at hand. But a few well-informed technologists did understand. Mitch Kapor, former president of Lotus Development Corp.; John Perry Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, decided to do something about it – and so the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born in July 1990. The Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one for the early internet: For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls.