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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is Founded

1990
Electronic Frontier Foundation 30th Anniversary logo

Electronic Frontier Foundation 30th Anniversary logo

In 1990 Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

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