ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION -- STATEMENT OF THE BOARD -- EFF

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION


STATEMENT OF THE BOARD


EFF MOVES TO CALIFORNIA, ELECTS NEW CHAIRMAN


**   Understanding guides action; action guides understanding.    **


At its last board meeting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation made a
number of significant decisions:


* LOCATION: We will move our physical headquarters to California's San
Francisco Bay Area.  We hope to complete the move by the end of August.


* BOARD: We have elected a new chairman, Esther Dyson, and vice-chairman,
John Perry Barlow.  The board also wishes to acknowledge the extraordinary
efforts of Vin Cipolla, the newest board member (elected in April 1995)
in accomplishing the transition.  Cipolla sits on the executive committee
and has been handling day-today management issues while we remain in
Washington DC.  The board also thanks co-founder Mitch Kapor, who remains
an active board member, for his leadership since he co-founded the
organization with John Perry Barlow in 1990, and David Johnson, for his
recent temporary tenure as chairman (which he has relinquished to devote
more time to starting up the Cyberspace Law Institute.  Other board
members are Dave Farber, John Gilmore and Rob Glaser.


* STAFF: Moving with the organization to California will be Mike Godwin,
staff counsel and perennial net presence, online services manager Stanton
McCandlish, and systems & network administrator Dan Brown.  We hope to
maintain continuing ties with director of legal services Shari Steele,
who prefers to remain in the Washington area.  Shari is currently
overseeing EFF's involvement in two precedent-setting legal cases:
Bernstein v. U.S. Department of State (challenging the inclusion of
encryption on the U.S. munitions list on 1st Amendment grounds) and RTC v.
Netcom (determining if system operators are going to be held liable for the
content of their users' speech).  Likewise, we are sorry to leave behind
director of finance and administration Darby Kay Costello, staff assistant
Jordan Ramacciato, and assistant manager of online services Eric Tachibana.
 Eric hopes to join us in our new location in January, after he completes
the last three courses of his master's degree.


* MISSION:  EFF's overall mission has not changed.  We are dedicated to
promoting civil rights *and* responsibilities in cyberspace.  Especially now
that governments have discovered the net and trying to figure out how to
regulate it, it is important to establish a clearer understanding both in the
public mind and within governments worldwide.  Cyberspace should not be a
lawless arena, but its diverse communities should be self-governing as
much as possible.  Specifically, we are dedicated to free speech, freedom of
association, diversity in cyberspace, protection of privacy, the right to
anonymity, and *proper* accountability (including immunity from liability for
sysops not directly involved in illegal acts).


Current hot issues include encryption (we support its availability from
private sources worldwide), privacy (we support strong privacy protection
both legally and technically, with maximum control of personal
information in individual's hands), sysop liability (we favor immunity in
most cases), censorship (we prefer private rating schemes for those who
wish to control what they or their children see), and intellectual
property rights (we are exploring new models to encourage creators, support
information integrity *and* foster the free flow of information -- a
challenging task!).  Obviously, all these issues are complex; if they
were not, they would not be controversial.  We see our mission as
helping to provide clear thinking about them through rational argument and
activism as needed.


We carry out our mission through means such as our online presence and a
legal "clinic", support (of various kinds) for relevant lawsuits, public
education, speeches and other public appearances, articles and other
documents of various kinds.  We participate actively in groups such as
the Stop 314 Coalition and the Interactive Working Group, in opposition
to legislative attempts at censorship.


In addition, many of our board and staff members are involved in a
variety of related efforts, ranging from the NII Advisory Council (Esther
Dyson), the Internet Society (Dave Farber), the IHPEG filtering
technology initiative (Rob Glaser) and the Cyberspace Law Institute
(David Johnson), and planning and support of the annual Computers,
Freedom and Privacy Conference.   We are seeking to expand our presence
overseas, reflecting the importance of the Internet and civil liberties
outside the United States.  We actively encourage the formation of
independent "electronic frontier" organizations in other parts of the world.


* FINANCES: EFF will continue to seek funding from all who support our basic
mission, be they individuals, foundations or corporations.  We do not tailor
our positions to please funding sources, but we do accept funds for specific
projects that fit our overall mission, as well as for continuing operations.


* CHANGES:  Over the years, EFF has had an ambivalent relationship with
Washington, DC.  We started in Boston in 1990; we opened a second office in
Washington in 1992 and then moved our headquarters there in late 1993.  But
over the years the world, Washington and EFF itself have changed.  We are
now moving to California to get closer to a major center of our natural
constituency -- net-aware people -- and further away from Washington
Beltway-centric thinking. There is now a sizable contingent of Net-aware
people and organizations in Washington -- including most notably the
Electronic Privacy and Information Center, the Center for Democracy and
Technology and the Progress and Freedom Foundation.


We believe that Silicon Valley in particular and the rest of the world in
general still underestimate the magnitude of the social and political changes
the Electronic Frontier will bring -- and we want to work out in the "real
world" as well as on the Net to guide those changes in a positive direction.


Together and individually, we look forward to working with all possible
constituencies to make cyberspace a new frontier of self-governance where
informed individuals can exercise their rights and fulfill their
responsibilities.


Contact:  Esther Dyson, +1 212 924 8800, edyson () eff org