Well.

EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff. It
had become a membership organization and was attracting grass-roots
support. It had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights
lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of the
Constitution in Cyberspace.

EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts to
change state and federal legislation on computer networking. Kapor in
particular had become a veteran expert witness, and had joined the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy
of Science and Engineering.

EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy" and
the CPSR Roundtable. It had carried out a press offensive that, in the
words of EFFector, "has affected the climate of opinion about computer
networking and begun to reverse the slide into 'hacker hysteria' that
was beginning to grip the nation."

It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.

And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier Foundation
had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson
Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati bulletin board system.
The defendants were, and are, the United States Secret Service, William
Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.

The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal court
as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress alleged
violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States
Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (42 USC
2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 USC
2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).

EFF had established that it had credibility. It had also established
that it had teeth.

In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally
with Mitch Kapor. It was my final interview for this book.

#

The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual
centers of the American republic. It is a very old city by American
standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century
graveyards, where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128
co-exist with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides,"
the USS CONSTITUTION.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed clashes
of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs. Today
there is a monumental spire on B