History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Well, no one submitted it (guess no one reads the LA Times), but from the Red Rock Eater list we have a link to Freedom Fighters of the Digital World, a laudatory history of the EFF. Read it, live it, remember it when you think "I can't make a difference".

Comments

Verio censoring John Gilmore's email

[SimHacker]

Verio has been censoring email from toad.com, which is the venerable hoptoad Usenet relay, and the hub of the pioneering The Little Garden ISP. It's is owned and operated by John Gilmore, one of the original founders of EFF.

From http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html:

Verio is censoring John Gilmore's email under pressure from anti-spammers.

Update (5 August 2001): After some interaction among me, Verio, and lawyers from Stanford Law School's Internet and Society law clinic, Verio agreed to not immediately terminate my service if I modified my mailer software to avoid forwarding large quantities of email from single addresses over short periods of time. This mailer change permits ordinary users to send a backlog of queued email, such as after reconnecting a Eudora laptop after a few days, but doesn't permit mass spamming. Verio was unwilling to concede their 'right' to decide I'm a bad guy at any moment and terminate my service, but they're on notice that I have reputable and capable legal representation, and will not hesitate to make both a big legal issue and a big press issue out of their censorship campaign if they try to impose it on me again.

Update (26 March 2001): The block against outgoing mail suddenly dissolved without warning at 12:47 PM Monday. I don't know why it disappeared, whether it will be back, or whether they still plan to terminate my entire Internet service as previously announced.

Update (21 March 2001): Verio plans to TERMINATE my T1 service on April 4, ending not just my outgoing email, but this web site, my customers' Internet service, etc. If this site disappears, see the mirror at http://cryptome.org

I am not a spammer, and have never sent any spam. I've had this same Internet connection since long before Verio even existed (they eventually acquired the ISP I cofounded). I've been paying them for the connection despite their billing department's incompetence about invoicing me for it. But under pressure from anti-spam organizations, Verio has blocked outgoing email from my machine. I am not able to send person-to-person email to my friends, my colleagues at EFF, or anyone else -- including you. Now they threaten to terminate my Internet service, which supplies not only me but my customers and users.

I think this is wrong, and that the anti-spam pressure tactics behind it are wrong. Any measure for stopping spam should have as its first goal "Allow and assist every non-spam message to reach its recipients." No current anti-spam policy I know of, including Verio's, SpamCop's, or MAPS's, even views this as a desirable goal, let alone implements it.

I'm pushing back by publicizing the problem, and meanwhile allowing their censorship to take effect. If you ever want to get an email from me again, it's time to speak up about this!

If you send me email, don't expect an email reply. Include some contact information for an uncensored medium, where the providers are common carriers, take no notice of the content of messages, and don't put arbitrary restrictions on what their customers are permitted to communicate. Leave me a phone number and/or a postal address.

The irony is that Verio now owns The Little Garden.

From http://www.toad.com/gnu:

The Little Garden (with John Romkey, David Henkel-Wallace, and Steve Crocker):
A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. now merged into Verio. We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to businesses. We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers by our common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we provide to you, and we will not censor it." This enabled a whole crop of smaller resellers in various locales to buy from us and offer other services to the public (like modem-based Internet connections). These resellers contributed to our volume of Internet traffic, and enabled us to provide higher quality service at lower prices. TLGnet was sold to Best Internet Communications in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was then bought by Hiway Technologies, which was then bought by Verio.)

From http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html:

Here's a copy of the terms and conditions of The Little Garden (TLG), the ISP that I co-founded with Tom Jennings (creator of the FidoNet), and which I bought my T1 service from. (TLG was bought by Best, which was bought by Hiway, which was bought by Verio.) Here's an excerpt:

TLG exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information passing through TLG. You are free to communicate commercial, noncommercial, personal, questionable, obnoxious, annoying, or any other kind of information, misinformation, or disinformation through our service. You are fully responsible for the privacy of, content of, and liability for your own communications.

-Don