Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded on July 10, 1990 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, EFF operates as a US 501(c)(3) charity with a staff of approximately 125 — lawyers, activists, and technologists working in combination — and is supported by more than 30,000 members worldwide. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people. It pursues that mission through four main instruments: impact litigation in the courts, policy analysis and lobbying before legislatures and regulatory bodies, grassroots activism and public education, and the development and deployment of open-source security and privacy tools. Charity Navigator has awarded EFF its highest possible four-star rating for more than eleven consecutive years. Donors do not determine EFF's agenda or positions, and EFF does not endorse private companies or their products.
The EFF was born from a collision between the early internet community and a federal government that did not yet understand what computers and networks were. In the spring of 1990, the US Secret Service was conducting a sweeping crackdown on hackers under Operation Sundevil, seizing computer equipment with little apparent regard for due-process or free-speech protections. One of the raids targeted Steve Jackson Games, a small role-playing-game publisher in Austin, Texas, whose equipment was confiscated and whose bulletin-board users' private email was deleted — despite no criminal charges ever being filed. Separately, FBI agents were visiting technologists — including Grateful Dead lyricist and Wyoming cattle rancher John Perry Barlow — to ask about hacker activity, often revealing a profound ignorance of how networks even worked.
Barlow and Mitch Kapor — founder of Lotus Development Corporation and one of the first investors in the internet — connected by phone while Kapor's plane flew over South Dakota, and during a subsequent meeting hatched what became the EFF. They were joined by John Gilmore, an early Sun Microsystems employee, with further support from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The organisation was formally unveiled on 10 July 1990, the same day it announced it was representing Steve Jackson Games in a lawsuit against the Secret Service. That case, ultimately decided in EFF's favour in 1993, established the first important legal precedent protecting the privacy of electronic communications: that stored email is protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Originally based at Kapor's Boston offices, EFF moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 1995, where it has remained. It re-opened a Washington, D.C. office in 2006 to deepen its policy presence.
EFF's work spans six interconnected issue areas, each combining legal, technical, and advocacy capacity.
Free Speech. EFF defends online expression against censorship by governments and corporations alike. Landmark cases include Bernstein v. US Department of Justice (1990s), in which EFF successfully argued that computer source code is speech protected by the First Amendment, forcing the US government to lift export restrictions on encryption software — an outcome that made strong cryptography globally available. EFF has challenged the Communications Decency Act (leading to the Supreme Court's landmark Reno v. ACLU ruling in 1997), fought strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), and consistently opposed legislation that would chill online expression, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the 2024 Kids Online Safety Act.
Privacy. EFF has been the country's most persistent institutional opponent of mass government surveillance. Following the 2013 Snowden revelations, EFF was coordinating counsel for more than forty national class-action lawsuits against telecommunications companies and the government challenging warrantless surveillance, including Hepting v. AT&T, filed in 2006. EFF has challenged the National Security Letter statute — dramatically expanded by the Patriot Act — and the Section 215 bulk phone-records programme. Its Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) guide, free and online since 2009, now runs to nearly 80,000 words and has been read by over 20 million people. The Atlas of Surveillance, produced in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, documents over 11,700 deployments of surveillance technology by US law enforcement as of 2024.
Creativity and Innovation. EFF works to protect fair use, net neutrality, open access, and the right to tinker with technology one owns. It challenges patent and copyright overreach in courts and before Congress, and represented the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive. EFF's Patent Busting Project, launched in 2004, identifies and challenges patents it considers illegitimate obstacles to innovation. EFF also built the Blue Ribbon Campaign (1995–96) against the Communications Decency Act and the Golden Key Campaign (1996) urging policymakers to reject mandatory encryption backdoors.
Security. EFF co-launched Let's Encrypt, the free certificate authority, and created Certbot — open-source software that automates HTTPS encryption for web servers. As of 2024, Certbot is installed on more than 4 million web servers, maintaining HTTPS certificates for over 31 million websites. When EFF and Let's Encrypt began this work in 2015, less than 40% of websites used HTTPS; that figure now exceeds 80% globally. EFF also built the browser extension HTTPS Everywhere (retired in 2023 once major browsers adopted the functionality natively), and continues to develop Privacy Badger (a free browser extension that prevents third-party tracking), Cover Your Tracks, and apkeep. Its Coders' Rights Project provides legal assistance to security researchers facing threats from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Transparency. EFF uses freedom-of-information laws, litigation, and public reporting to hold government accountable. It publishes the Deeplinks Blog, one of the most widely read technology-law publications in the United States, covering surveillance, censorship, intellectual property, and security. Its podcast How to Fix the Internet won a 2024 Anthem Award, a 2024 Signal Award (Gold), a 2024 w3 Silver Award, and a 2024 Communicator Award of Excellence.
International. EFF's international team advocates for privacy, free speech, and an open internet globally, exposing mass surveillance, challenging export of surveillance technology to repressive regimes, and supporting local digital-rights activists. In 2019, EFF and the Open Technology Institute delivered testimony on the UK Online Harms White Paper. EFF contributed to a 2026 UN report documenting deterioration of press freedom and free expression in conflict zones.
EFF's full library of resources is freely available at eff.org. This includes the Deeplinks Blog (daily legal and policy analysis), the Surveillance Self-Defense guide, the Atlas of Surveillance, tool guides for Signal, two-factor authentication, and VPNs, and the download pages for Privacy Badger, Certbot, and other open-source software. Annual reports, Form 990 filings, and donor policy are published on the EFF website. EFF's Action Center allows members and the public to contact elected officials directly on active campaigns. Membership (which supports the organisation financially) is open to anyone; individual donors account for more than half of EFF's public support, with foundation grants contributing approximately 30 percent. EFF has held a four-star Charity Navigator rating for over eleven consecutive years.