The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was established to help
civilize the "electronic frontier"---the Cyberspacial medium
becoming ever-present in today's society; to make it truly useful and
beneficial not just to a technical elite, but to everyone; and to do
this in a way which is in keeping with the society's highest
traditions of the free and open flow of information and
communication. {This section was derived from eff.about, available
along with other material via anonymous FTP from ftp.eff.org}
The mission of the EFF is to engage in and support educational
activities which increase popular understanding of the opportunities
and challenges posed by developments in computing and
telecommunications;
to develop among policy-makers a better understanding of the
issues underlying free and open telecommunications, and support the
creation of legal and structural approaches which will ease the
assimilation of these new technologies by society;
to raise public awareness about civil liberties issues arising from
the rapid advancement in the area of new computer-based
communications media and, where necessary, support litigation in the
public interest to preserve, protect, and extend First Amendment
rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications
technology;
to encourage and support the development of new tools which will
endow non-technical users with full and easy access to computer-based
telecommunications;
The Usenet newsgroups comp.org.eff.talk and comp.org.eff.news are
dedicated to discussion concerning the EFF. They also have mailing
list counterparts for those that don't have access to Usenet,
eff-talk-request@eff.org and eff-news-request@eff.org. The first is
an informal arena (aka a normal newsgroup) where anyone may voice his
or her opinions. The second, comp.org.eff.news, is a moderated area
for regular postings from the EFF in the form of EFFector Online. To
submit a posting for the EFFector Online, or to get general
information about the EFF, write to eff@eff.org. There is also a
wealth of information available via anonymous FTP on ftp.eff.org.