Scott Harris has written an excellent history and overview of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that was published in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
Harris quotes Dave Farber summing up the division between the old and new Internet: “In the early days the Net was free. It was an information barter economy. You gave things to people, they gave things to you. It was that way for a long time, until relatively recently…. It was almost like the utopian socialism attitude of the ‘20s and ‘30s.”
The Harris piece also notes John Perry Barlow’s comparision of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center to the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to orchestrate the Nazi takeover of Germany. The comparison is somewhat inflamatory: the Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis themselves; there’s no evidence that any American government official had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.
The best quote is saved for last, when John Gilmore is asked about the vitality of the EFF’ work: “What we’ve been doing has been needed all along. You always need the Constitution. Right?”
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