Freedom

Interview with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn on John Perry Barlow's Legacy

Sol Lederman — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 18:12:35 +0000

Cindy Cohn reflects on John Perry Barlow's greatest gifts as founder and leader.

Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the international non-profit digital rights organization. From 2000 to 2015 Cohn served as Legal Director and General Counsel for EFF, but her involvement with the organization goes back to 1993. On February 7th, Cohn announced the death of EFF Founder John Perry Barlow. Barlow was a multi-talented man and a colorful figure. He was a poet, an essayist, a cattle rancher and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Ms. Cohn was gracious enough to let me interview her about her unique perspective working with cyberlibertarian Barlow for the past 27 years.

Cindy Cohn hugs John Perry Barlow at EFF's 25th anniversary event.

SL: Cindy, thank you for agreeing to this interview under these sad circumstances.

You became involved with the EFF in 1993, and you were discussing important issues with Barlow since the EFF's inception in 1990. What were the pressing issues of that time?

CC: Freeing encryption from government control, establishing that the Internet was a place of free speech (CDA decided at the Supreme Court) and limiting the obligation of Internet providers to provide governmental access (CALEA).

SL: In recent times, what forces did Barlow see as the greatest threat to Internet freedom?

CC: Recently he was focused on protecting whistleblowers and ensuring that people had a "right to know". He was especially committed to the work of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that he helped found.

SL: What was Barlow's biggest win for Internet freedom?

CC: It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow's vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. "That idea is under threat now but the fact that we all feel it's something we stand to "lose" as opposed to something we never had is because of Barlow.

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Our Assignment

Doc Searls — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 23:18:55 +0000

by Doc Searls

We need to protect the freedoms in which Linux was born and grew up.

I've been with Linux Journal since it was a gleam in Phil Hughes' eye, back in 1993. Phil's original plan was for something he called "a free software magazine". I was one of the friends Phil recruited to think and talk, mostly by e-mail, about how to make the magazine happen. The project was pretty far downstream when Phil sent the whole thing sideways with five words: "There's this kid from Finland...." That was the first I'd heard of Linus, or of Linux. But Phil was one of the world's experts on UNIX (having fathered many UNIX publications in previous years), and he was convinced that Linux was exactly the free operating system the world was waiting for. He was right.

And so Linux Journal was born, in March 1994, just as Linux itself arrived at version 1.0. Its first Editor in Chief was Bob Young, who knew almost nothing about Linux when Phil recruited him. ("He was selling circuit boards or something from a booth in the back of a tradeshow", Phil said.) Not long after that, Bob left to start a Linux company of his own, called Red Hat.

The first piece I wrote for Linux Journal was an interview with Craig Burton for an insert called Websmith. Craig sought me out, because he wanted to alert the Linux folks to LDAP, which he said was throwing a monkey wrench into Microsoft's plans to do for networked directories what it had done for desktop operating systems. Craig was right, and the wrench worked.

I started writing full time for LJ in 1998, covering the open-sourcing of Netscape's browser (now known as Firefox) and the creation of its new parent, Mozilla.org. This coincided with the birth of the open-source movement and the dot-com explosion, for which Linux itself was ground zero. The biggest IPOs of 1999 (a record IPO year) were Red Hat, Andover (which had earlier acquired Slashdot) and VA Linux (which later acquired Andover). Linux Journal also had offers at the time to sell out, but Phil turned them down. If he had said yes, some of us (especially Phil) would have scored big, but Linux Journal would have been long gone by now.

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Returning to Ground from the Web's Clouds

Doc Searls — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 17:38:41 +0000

by Doc Searls

The Net as we know it today first became visible to me in March 1994, when I was among several hundred other tech types gathered at Esther Dyson's PC Forum conference in Arizona. On stage was John Gage of Sun Microsystems, projecting a Mosaic Web browser from a flaky Macintosh Duo, identical to the one on my lap. His access was to Sun over dial-up.

Everybody in the audience knew about the Net, and some of us had been on it one way or another, but few of us had seen it in the fullness John demonstrated there. (At that date, there were a sum total of just three Internet Service Providers.) James Fallows was in the crowd, and he described it this way for The Atlantic:

In the past year millions of people have heard about the Internet, but few people outside academia or the computer industry have had a clear idea of what it is or how it works. The Internet is, in effect, a way of combining computers all over the world into one big computer, which you seemingly control from your desk. When connected to the Internet, you can boldly prowl through computers in Singapore, Buenos Aires, and Seattle as if their contents resided on your own machine.

In the most riveting presentation of the conference, John Gage, of Sun Microsystems, demonstrated the World Wide Web, the gee-whizziest portion of the Internet, in which electronic files contain not only text but also graphics and sound and video clips. Using Mosaic, a free piece of "navigator" software that made moving around the Web possible, Gage clicked on icons on his screen exactly as if he were choosing programs or directories on his own hard disk. He quickly connected to a Norwegian computer center that had been collecting results during the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and checked out a score, duplicating what Internet users had done by the millions every day during the games, when CBS-TV was notoriously late and America-centric in reporting results.

Note the terms here. John used Mosaic to "control", "boldly prowl" and "navigate" his way around the Web, which was the "gee-whizziest portion" of the Net.

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Anonymity On-line

John Knight — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:00:00 +0000

by John Knight

We've covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin's "Browse the Web without a Trace", January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I'm justified in featuring it this month.

For those not in the know, Tor stands for The Onion Router, and its roots go all the way back to the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor's original sponsors. It then became an EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) project until 2005, and it now has moved up to being its own nonprofit research/education organization: the Tor Project.

The essential idea is that your original IP address is masked by passing it through numerous special routers, designed to avoid keeping records, until the original source has been lost and the receiving end knows only about the last Tor box it encounters. To quote Tor's man page:

"Users choose a source-routed path through a set of nodes and negotiate a "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node, which reveals the downstream node."

"Basically, Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion routers"). Users bounce their TCP streams—Web traffic, FTP, SSH and so on—around the routers, and recipients, observers and even the routers themselves have difficulty tracking the source of the stream."

However, all that may be a bit headache-inducing, and the Tor Web site explains things in human terms quite nicely:

"Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis."

"Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including Web browsers, instant-messaging clients, remote login and other applications based on the TCP protocol."

Tor takes a clever approach to anonymity, deliberately losing IP addresses as it bounces from server to server.

Tor can be a bit hard to understand at first, but if you look around, many tools can help you along the way, such as TorK and even custom distributions built around using Tor.

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