The EFF Pioneer Award is an annual prize by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for people who have made significant contributions to the empowerment of individuals in using computers. Until 1998 it was presented at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., United States. Thereafter it was presented at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference. In 2007 it was presented at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
Name change to EFF Awards:
Ward Christensen is the co-founder off the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online. Christensen, along with partner Randy Suess, members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), started development during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, and officially established CBBS four weeks later, on February 16, 1978. CACHE members frequently shared programs and had long been discussing some form of file transfer, and the two used the downtime during the blizzard to implement it.
The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Canada. It was founded by Ronald Deibert in 2001. The laboratory studies information controls that impact the openness and security of the Internet and that pose threats to human rights. The organization uses a "mixed methods" approach which combines computer-generated interrogation, data mining, and analysis with intensive field research, qualitative social science, and legal and policy analysis methods. The organization has played a major role in providing technical support to journalists investigating the use of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware on journalists, politicians and human rights advocates.
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. (EFA) is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights. It has been vocal on the issue of Internet censorship in Australia.
Ronald James Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, philosopher, founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, 816 F. Supp. 432, was a lawsuit arising from a 1990 raid by the United States Secret Service on the headquarters of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) in Austin, Texas. The raid, along with the Secret Service's unrelated Operation Sundevil, was influential in the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician and whistleblower who revealed details of the company's cooperation with the United States National Security Agency in installing network hardware at a site known as Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications. The subsequent media coverage became a major story in May 2006. He wrote a book about the NSA and AT&T's cooperation in surveiling everyone on the internet and his experience in discovering it and trying to tell the public called Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It.
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.
The Scientific American special issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks is a special issue of Scientific American dedicated to articles concerning impending changes to the Internet in the period prior to the expansion and mainstreaming of the World Wide Web via Mosaic and Netscape. This issue contained essays by a number of important computer science and internet pioneers. It bore the promotional cover title Scientific American presents the September 1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, and Networks.
Jon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry." Callas is credited with creating several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP, which he wrote. Prior to his work at Entrust, he was Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of PGP Corporation and the former Chief Technical Officer of Entrust.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet civil liberties.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States.
La Quadrature du Net is a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms for its citizens. It advocates for French and European legislation to respect the founding principles of the Internet, most notably the free circulation of knowledge. La Quadrature du Net engages in public-policy debates concerning, for instance, freedom of speech, copyright, regulation of telecommunications and online privacy.
Jewel v. National Security Agency, 673 F.3d 902, was a class action lawsuit argued before the District Court for the Northern District of California and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, filed by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of American citizens who believed that they had been surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA) without a warrant. The EFF alleged that the NSA's surveillance program was an "illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance" and claimed violations of the Fourth Amendment.
Jérémie Zimmermann is a French computer science engineer and co-founder of the Paris-based La Quadrature du Net, a citizen advocacy group defending fundamental freedoms online as well as a co-founder of Hacking With Care, a "collective composed of hackers-activists, caregivers, artists, sociologist, growing quite literally by contact and affinity".
Caspar Pemberton Scott Bowden was a British privacy advocate, formerly a chief privacy adviser at Microsoft. Styled as "an independent advocate for information privacy rights, and public understanding of privacy research in computer science", he was on the board of the Tor anonymity service. and a fellow of the British Computer Society. Having predicted US mass surveillance programmes such as PRISM from open sources, he gathered renewed attention after the Snowden leaks vindicated his warnings.
Global surveillance whistleblowers are whistleblowers who provided public knowledge of global surveillance.
The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, New Hampshire. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.
Privacy Badger is a free and open-source browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Firefox for Android created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Its purpose is to promote a balanced approach to internet privacy between consumers and content providers by blocking advertisements and tracking cookies that do not respect the Do Not Track setting in a user's web browser. A second purpose, served by free distribution, has been to encourage membership in and donation to the EFF.
Anriette Esterhuysen is a human rights defender and computer networking pioneer from South Africa. She has pioneered the use of Internet and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to promote social justice in South Africa and throughout the world, focusing on affordable Internet access. She was the executive director of the Association for Progressive Communications from 2000 until April 2017, when she became APC's Director of Policy and Strategy. In November 2019 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Esterhuysen to chair the Internet Governance Forum’s Multistakeholder Advisory Group.
A Machine Identification Code (MIC), also known as printer steganography, yellow dots, tracking dots or secret dots, is a digital watermark which certain color laser printers and copiers leave on every printed page, allowing identification of the device which was used to print a document and giving clues to the originator. Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, its existence became public only in 2004. In 2018, scientists developed privacy software to anonymize prints in order to support whistleblowers publishing their work.