 Hello, hello, and welcome to the EFF awards ceremony. I'm your host this evening, I'm Corey Doctorow. Thank you very much. That's very kind of you. I hope you will cheer even more loudly for our inductees tonight. They really deserve it. Thank you for coming out to celebrate the accomplishments of these people, working towards a better future for technology users, which is to say everyone. Now before we get started, if everyone can just take a moment to pull out your distraction rectangle and press the silencing button. Now we do take your comfort and your safety very seriously. We have event guidelines and a code of conduct. You can check them out at EFF.org slash event expectations, capital E's in event and expectations. I don't know if that's case sensitive. If you have any questions or if you need assistance tonight, we have three designated event monitors. That's Allison Morris, Kelly Iscara, and Lee Walker Kelly, and Allison and Lee. Can you please put your hands up? All right. So any problems tonight, you go talk to them. And of course any EFF staffer is happy to chat with you about anything, including this event. So on behalf of the EFF team, I'd like to thank the sponsors of tonight's event. And I'd like to thank the 30,000 plus dues paying EFF members all around the world who make our work possible every day. All right. I have a confession to make. I am old. I turned 52 this summer. I am now the full deck of cards. I have two artificial hips. I have cataracts in both eyes. I am officially old as dirt. You may know that the ARP has a squad of crack privacy invading junk mail ninjas who will track you down on your 50th birthday and try and sell you a membership. What's less well known is that they will also issue you a license to complain that things used to be better in your day. Now I know that this complaint is trite, but I think when it comes to the internet, it's not wrong. I mean, I think the internet used to be better back before it turned into what the Kiwi hacker Tom Eastman calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. I miss that old good internet, that internet that we had when I started working at EFF more than 20 years ago. I wasn't old when I started working at EFF. EFF aged me. And in the decade since I have watched the internet in shitify. I've watched as companies bought their ways to dominance and I've watched them go from having their users back to selling those users out. Now it's tempting to think that today's tech leaders are uniquely clever for having captured so much power or uniquely evil for how they wield that power, but the reality is that tech, our industry has always had a mix of people who cared about the liberatory power of digital networks and people who wanted to take that power away and kill any chance that technology would be a force for human liberation. Every tech firm has always had a mix of starry idealists who wanted to wire together a digital nervous system worthy of the name and Vichy nerds who wanted to lure us into prisons by telling us that they were walled gardens and that we'd be safe inside of them. And sure, you're safe in a walled garden. Tech companies will go to enormous lengths to protect to prevent other predators from picking your pocket, but only because they want to make a meal of you, your data, your dignity, your money, and your well-being. The old good internet gave way to the inshitter net when tech ate itself whole, merging to monopoly, fueled by bottomless investor appetite for eliminating competition and taking over the digital world. No one hates capitalism more than capitalists. All the better to eat us with. Now, when tech users have a choice, when they can hack, when they can mod, when they can reconfigure the products and services that they use, when they can leave one product for another without losing their data, their friendships or their customers, then companies are rightfully afraid that doing something their users hate that will harm those users will lead to losing those users and hence losing money. But when the internet dwindles to five giant websites filled with screenshots of techs from the other four and users have nowhere to go, when an industry dwindles to a handful of giant cozy companies, it's easy for them to extract massive profits and easy for them to decide as a group how to mobilize those profits to make sure their policy priorities become law, which is why we don't get privacy laws. And the laws that we do have, the labor laws, the consumer protection laws, they don't get enforced. Meanwhile, the things that we might do to disensitify our technology, jailbreaking, tracker blocking, reverse engineering, they get made increasingly illegal. Turning the internet into a place where modding our own devices becomes a legal minefield, where giant companies can shut us down for what amounts to felony contempt of business model. And that's how we got the inshitter net. Not because the people involved in technology got worse, but because the worst people in tech acquired market power and they turned that into political power and they wielded that power to make everything that wasn't mandatory illegal. I watched the old good internet turn into the inshitter net and I watched as EFF's fight to save that old good internet changed because it's too late to bring back the old good internet. And frankly, that's fine because we deserve something better than the old good internet. We deserve a new good internet, an internet that's more inclusive than the old one, an internet where more people have more technological self-determination. And that brings me to tonight's honorees. These people, these projects, they're not backwards looking. They're not mired in toxic nostalgia for a golden age that frankly had a lot of tarnish. They're not trying to bring anything back. They're trying to make something new. We deserve a better internet. When you're wiring up the world with a single system to deliver a free speech, free press, free association, access to family life, civics, politics, education, health and even romance, you don't stop just because some mediocre tech bros, no better and no worse than any of us, got the temporary upper hand and conjured up the inshitter net. You keep building, you keep dreaming, you keep fighting. That's what we're here for tonight, to honor the people fighting that fight, to honor the people who are winning that fight. The people who will help us make the inshitter net nothing but a regrettable transitional phase between the old good internet and our new good internet. Thank you. Hi, Wett. Thank you. Time for the key exchange. I think it's falling into the air. Somebody has to do something of noxious. Thank you, Wett. As someone with a lot of metal in his body, I share your feelings about metal detectors. I'm not kidding. I mean, you know, everyone figures out where they're gonna draw the line. Everyone tries to find the balance between expedience and principle. We are big, bigger than we've ever been this year, thanks to you folks coming, but not big enough to rent a much bigger space and too small to rent smaller spaces. If you invite a bunch of your friends next year, we can fit somewhere larger with different policies. Now, to kick off tonight's program, I wanna introduce my long, long, long time friend, EFF's executive director, Cindy Cohen. Back when I first joined EFF and ended up as its inaugural European director, Cindy led EFF's lawyers through some of their most iconic battles. Today, as our executive director, she is our poll star, the keeper of our institutional memory, our strategist squaring us up against the biggest obstacles to our digital security and free expression online. Please welcome, Ms. Cindy Cohen. Thank you. May I wish for you all that you never follow Cory Doctorow giving a speech. That's my wish for you. And my wish for you, what Diffie is that we make you happy next year, because I always wanna make what Diffie happy. So I am Cindy Cohen. I am so excited to get to be with everyone again this year and to celebrate this year's EFF award winners. We have so many old and new friends here tonight. We have members of our board of directors, our advisory board, a cluster of current and former EFF interns and staffers who are part of the broader web of community that at this point, literally stretches around the world, ready to stand up for digital rights. We have a couple of past award winners. I'm especially excited to have our old friend, Chelsea Manning here, as well as last year's award. Yeah, let's pause on that for a second. And last year's award winner, Kyle Wiens, who is just kicking it on right to repair people. And of course, we have all of our friends from other organizations who we partner with on litigation, on lobbying, on developing our tech tools, and generally making mischief. Thanks to you all. In fact, one of the things I love about the awards are the connections that people get to make here. So even if you don't think you know anyone else here, I hereby give you permission to say hello to someone who you haven't yet connected with. And a slight suggestion, you can ask them how they got interested in EFF. I do this all the time and I get amazing stories. So please do, please meet the people who are here. These are the people who are making the digital world better. While I'm terribly proud of EFF's accomplishments, we know that we are stronger together. And as I mentioned, we are part of a growing movement that stands up for technological users and creators as the world continues to struggle with what we've wrought and that Corey rightfully named the inshidification of technological sources. That means that the work we have to do has never been more meaningful. Even back in 1990, the founders of EFF realized that technology would become entwined with the conversations that we love, that people who we coordinate and organize with, the ideas we share and the information we can access and the things that we can create. And I just wanna pause for a second because I'm even older than Corey. And I wanna just remind everybody that you don't need an electronic frontier foundation if everything is magically gonna get better because of technology. This is one of the things that I admit, and this is me being old again, but continues to bother me about some of the modern takes on the 1990s internet, including our dear founder, John Perry Barlow. Too often, we get portrayed as wild-eyed optimists who didn't recognize the dangers to come. But EFF was founded to fight for your rights because we knew there were gonna be fights. And of course, the scope of the digital world has grown, and so have the number and the nature of the fights that we need to take on. We realize that free speech fights that used to just be about governments are also today increasingly about the tech giants, including the ways in which the hegemony of those giants have a huge impact on who gets to speak and who gets censured. Surveillance has long been facilitated by those companies, but now the business model means that corporate interests and governmental interests in spying on us are mutually reinforcing. And surveillance, which used to be the realm of national governments, is now down on the street level with so many devices of all sizes and shapes, and as as we learned last week, cars, spy on us and reuse the data through shady data brokers. And of course, it wouldn't be 2023 if I didn't have to also talk about the risks, harms, and benefits of artificial intelligence or even just machine learning. Although at EFF I have to admit, we are more focused on the current harms that are happening to the most marginalized in our society by the use of these tools than some of the crazy fears voiced by billionaires. Thanks to our members, we have grown along with the size of the fight, although we're still generally the David against our Goliath adversaries. And even as the landscape has changed, the old fights remained. I mean, we're honoring the Signal Foundation tonight, which is teeth by jowl, working to protect your right to have a private conversation using encryption. People, this is 2023. I started fighting over this in 1994. What the hell, right? But we're glad that they're here, that they're strong and they've created tools that millions and millions of people rely on. Signal saves lives and it's really important that we protect it and what it does. Now, I'm glad that we get to do this and that EFF gets to be one of the voices that people look to through wisdom, but it's not just me. Let me crow a little bit about our amazing team. Our engineering and design team has put together a little sizzle roll of EFF in the news and I'd love to share it with you. Can we roll it? The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. La Fundación Frontera Electrónica. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. We all dislike pervasive online surveillance that comes with the modern web advertising business that's dominated by Google. We certainly have a lot of inaccuracies in facial recognition, especially for people of color and people with darker skin. There's always been tools that speakers have used to help them compose and create their speech. And I do think that AI is best thought of in that way. They explicitly say that the biometrics they capture from you can be used for any purpose that would benefit their economic interest. And they have the right to criticize them, but they don't have the right to legally force them to publish certain content, to not recommend other types of content, and so on. Why Section 230 is so important is because it's legal protections for online intermediaries, power sort of the underlying architecture that we all use every day. Keep backups, because if you do get ransom, if you do get infected with ransomware, you can restore from the backups. It's really important to look at 230 as a free speech protection for users. So Section 230 is really just enshrining in law the fundamental free speech principles that the First Amendment already protects. Really, there's no way to separate the harms and the risks of government use of face recognition technology from the use of the technology at all. License paid readers are what we call a master surveillance technology. They collect information on everyone. In el Congreso, en los medios de comunicación nacionales, las comunidades fronterizas son como terrenos valdíos, un desierto donde nadie vive. Data can be exposed. Somebody could infect your phone with malware. That could be used to track you or to download your emails or to read your messages. La tecnología desplegada a lo largo de la frontera sur de Estados Unidos para contrarrestar el contrabando humano y de narcóticos. Once you offer this technology, it is so easy to abuse and it's so tempting to abuse that, you know, if the power is there, people will exploit it. The verification was really important because it meant that if you as a person reporting on something or you just as a user shared something from someone with a blue check mark, you could be sure it was from who they said they were. And the result is the most comprehensive map of surveillance infrastructure along the US-Mexico border. Ma says that the scope of this technology raises serious privacy concerns. Whatever they did was clearly insufficient. It did not even clear the most basic bar of what you want to do when you want to ban someone. AirTags do place Android users disproportionately at risk. We feel relieved that the Supreme Court recognized that these were important legal issues that were going to affect every internet user. I think the police are capturing way more information than they actually need to solve crimes or handle public safety. But to the people outside of California who want to come to our state to get an abortion, it can be the difference between being prosecuted or not. Now the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that's illegal under California law. For me, looking at his legacy, I think giving other people the feeling that they can stand up and tell the truth to is something that he wanted and really supported in so many other people. Impressive, huh? It's amazing. At the end of that clip, if it wasn't obvious, I'm referring to our friend Daniel Ellsberg who we lost this summer. Dan was a lifelong whistleblower and activist and he was an even honoree at EFF's award ceremony a few years ago. At that ceremony, we were very proud to host the moment where he met one of his heroes, our friend Chelsea Manning. We miss Dan, but he left a legacy that we hope to keep alive and vibrant in the years to come. Quite a few of the clips talk about the Supreme Court fight that we helped with this last year in two cases called Google vs. Gonzalez and Twitter vs. Tomney. We were relieved that the court in those cases refused to weaken one of the key laws supporting free expression online and recognize that digital platforms shouldn't be liable for their users' illegal acts except in extraordinary circumstances and that ensures that everyone can continue to use those services to speak and organize that fight. The Supreme Court sidestepped that issue but you're going to see us continue to fight to protect that because we know that everybody's speech on the internet depends on other people being willing to host it and that marginalized people often hit the brunt of that. So let me give you just a little survey of some of the issues that were active right now. First of all, I want to take a moment to celebrate a really big win. My friend and previous EFF award winner Carl Malamud won his case to free the law. As the DC Circuit found that technical standards like fire and electrical codes developed by private organizations but incorporated into the public law can be freely disseminated without liability for copyright infringement. Hooray for fair use. Our own Corinne McSherry argued that case and our senior staff attorney Mitch Stoltz, oh gosh, I think I missed your title, but was a key lawyer involved. We have had long and hard fights. That one took about a decade. And so it's important for us to come together as a community and celebrate these wins. So hooray us. Now onto the fights right now that are front of mind. There are a series of proposed laws in the U.S. and Europe most importantly one called COSA or the Kids Online Safety Act that seeks to sacrifice everyone's privacy for an empty claim that undermining our rights will better protect children from abuse. It won't work and we need to stop it. As I mentioned above we are facing a horrible bill called the Online Safety Act in the U.K. that will undermine end-to-end encryption. Again with little promise of making anyone safer the bill seems to be on a fast track and while we have at least a fast track so watch for news about that and the ability to stand up in the near future on the slightly better news we've managed to I think temporarily delay the U.S. version of this which is called the EARNET Act that would have a similar effect works a little differently here but keep an eye out for EARNET. EARNET feels to us a little like the zombie that we keep having to kill and it comes back again. And sometimes it just keep an eye on how they change the names and rearrange things but we'll tell you when it's at issue again. There's a lot of work going on that I think doesn't get as much attention sometimes as the U.S. legislative battles. Our colleague Katitsa Rodriguez along with our colleague Karen Gullo have just been taking on the UN Cyber Crime Treaty negotiations. This is a treaty that where all the governments of the world are getting together to try to undermine your human rights in the use of digital works and we're going to continue to shine a light and throw as many spanners in networks as we can. Our dear friends as much as we were so happy to have our dear friend Carl Malamud win his fight our dear friends at the Internet archive continue to face potentially ruinous litigation for having the audacity to offer kids and the rest of us a digital library. I am not kidding, this is ridiculous. And then coming up coming into December section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act which is the federal law that undermines a lot of the mass spying done by the NSA is up for renewal. We are deeply involved in trying to make this law go away entirely. It should never have been passed or at a minimum have some major reforms to stop what appears to be happening now which is it's a way for the FBI to end run the warrant requirement in seeking information about this. So those are just a few of the fights that we're going to have and I think we're going to find right now. There are so many more. Of course, if you're here tonight I hope you follow EFF and you will take a stand to support us on this. It really does matter when people show up and make their voices heard. It would be easy to see the world is all doom and gloom when you're tackling these kinds of heavy issues. We see the impacts of those seeking reproductive assistance whose digital activities are tracked and then used for prosecution. The journalists and activists around the world who are tracked and even killed through malware. But we do this work because we believe that we can fix the internet. We believe in the future that Corey talked about. That's why we named the podcast How to Fix the Internet to force us to continue to keep our eyes on the prize that the world looks like if we get it right. Our team of amazing lawyers, activists and technologies detangle complex digital rights quandaries again and again and we do so because we want to educate and empower you, the technology developers and our lawmakers and our judges to do better. And our dream is that everyone in this room will not only stand up for their rights to stand up with you. Thank you. Yes. So, but I don't want, I want us to get to the centerpiece of the night which is the moment that we take as a community to celebrate some of the people who've really made big change in the world. First of all, Alexandra Alex Nova Elbakyan who will receive the EFF award for Access to Scientific Knowledge The Library Freedom Project who will receive the EFF award for Innovation and Democracy Information Democracy sorry about that and the Signal Foundation who will receive the EFF award for Communications Privacy Congratulations to each of our honorees and cheers to all of you for being here and being part of this community keep doing good work in the world and remember that we're all in this together. Thanks, Corey. Thank you, Cindy. That was wonderful. So I'm going to call to the stage to present our first EFF award my friend EFF's legal director Dr. Corinne McSherry Corinne is a specialist in intellectual property but who's among us isn't. She is also an expert on open access and free speech issues and a policy expert on copyright and best practices for online expression. Please welcome Corinne. Thank you all for coming. I love, this is one of my favorite EFF events and it's so great to see you all here. So I feel like I wrote my speech separately and I'm just picking up on the theme which is like, yeah, it's super easy to date on the internet right now. I don't hate on the internet but it's not because I'm nostalgic. It's because I know for one thing the internet is not social media and the internet is a network that makes it easier for most fundamental the promise of the internet is it's a network that makes it easier for more people in more countries around the world to access and share more knowledge more quickly than ever before. That is extraordinary. It is unprecedented it's worth remembering when we get bogged down in the bullshit. That in turn we have seen and this isn't new this has been happening for decades we're celebrating it tonight that has spurred new learning new research at an extraordinary clip it makes it possible for a journalist covering a pipeline explosion to jump online read the relevant codes and then ask hard questions of the CEO about whether that pipeline was built to code it makes it possible for a student to read a book that's in the public domain but has been banned in their local library or their school library it makes it possible for a scientist in India to learn from cutting edge work that's happening in Australia and then compare notes collaborate with that Aussie researcher and generate new insights for a sociologist in California who's studying reproductive health outcomes to do comparative research in other communities around the world and take those results and develop new public health strategies for new communities while many many factors played a role in the extraordinarily rapid development of COVID vaccines one of them was surely the ability of researchers around the world to collaborate quickly easily compare results and develop new insights together that too is the internet it's all great it's fantastic and it's probably one of the best use of your tax dollars that any of us could imagine because a thing to realize is that most basic research is publicly funded as is the peer review that helps validate it in 2019 US taxpayers alone spent more than $140 billion on research and that's well done good on it we paid for it the internet made it cheaper and easier to share it here's the rub so maybe we should get to read it and share it ourselves right? or perhaps it depends on who you ask how much money is still locked behind paywalls that are created and policed by a handful of extremely wealthy publishers and unless you're attached to a wealthy private company or university that can afford to spend millions of dollars in subscription fees every year you'll have a hard time getting access getting into those paywalls in fact even wealthy universities are willing to manage their library budgets and they're more than a little irritated that they are spending so much to get access to research generated at their own institutions and meanwhile academic publishers are raking in billions billions in profits every year this is a racket that benefits no one other than those publishers which is why EFF and so many others are fighting to change the rules so that the internet can serve one of its most basic purposes promoting access to knowledge tonight we recognize one of the leaders internationally of that work Alexandra Elbaquian the founder of SIHO as a neuroscience student in Kazakhstan she needed access to research papers but like many people around the world she couldn't afford the fees that journals charged to get access to those $30 per article now I don't know how many of you have done academic research but you have to look at a lot of articles before you can come to a conclusion so also like many people she asked others who did have passwords who did have access to those paywalled journal collections to get those articles for her that's not uncommon what is uncommon what is different that she did is to help many others who are in the same boat she built software to streamline the process and a site to go with it SIHOP SIHOP used donated passwords to download articles on request but then retained a copy for future use by others it's amassed more than 50 million articles and with more than 500,000 daily visits from all over the world including the US but mostly outside of the United States for students and researchers especially in global majority countries it's a simply irreplaceable resource and it's not likely to be replaced but here's the really courageous part of course the publishing giants are not happy about this every download from their view every download that they're not paid for is a loss from their perspective that's a fee they didn't get paid never mind that most SIHOP users can't afford to pay those fees anyway this does not enter into their calculus so they've sued Alexandra and SIHOP for copyright infringement in courts in the United States and around the world today they're faced with the threat of financial ruin and prison Alexandra's had to go underground but she continues to raise her voice speaking frankly about how the world needs and uses SIHOP her words and her work should shame the academic publishing industry if only there wasn't just so much money keeping those paywalls up nonetheless she stands tall and we recognize her for that the open access movement is fighting to get rid of paywalls altogether and we're making progress but in the meantime thanks to Alexandra's courage and creativity researchers around the world have SIHOP it is my honor and privilege to recognize her for the 2023 EFF award ok so hello everyone thank you very much for giving me this award as it was very unexpected because I started this project more than 10 years ago already and it never got any award and I became a customer to it well of course since the beginning there have been always many people around me who keep telling me hey this project deserves a Nobel prize because it contributed that much into science well actually I agree with them because SIHOP was kind of unique in that respect that it became the very first project to make scientific knowledge freely available on the internet well of course in the past you could go online and download some books about science here but the big secret of science is that you do not need books you need journals because all scientific knowledge is published in journals since about 70th century and today if we try to count all articles that have been published in science journals since the very beginning it will be very hard to count and nobody knows for sure but rough estimate will be about 120 million papers and if you look into the past this academic publishing enterprise was mostly non-profit but in the last 50 years everything changed in science we have a few really huge companies such as Elsevier Springer, Wally etc and they publish thousands of academic journals and they basically control all communication in science and yes they make a huge amount of money from it because they sell access to these journals so if some student in some poor country sees some article in a journal related to her research project they cannot normally access with it and it will even be the case for articles that were published for example in 1976 for example 10 years old articles 30 years old 5 years old you cannot access them because they cost money and very expensive and it shouldn't be that way every person should have access to because knowledge is a natural human right and having a few bit companies who restrict access to all knowledge is not normal and it shouldn't be like that and actually when they started seeing me it was in 2016 my project got some discussion in the media and you could see that people generally approve it they think that current state of things is not fair and I hope it's unexpected that my project is going to be discussed in the United Nations because access to knowledge is a worldwide problem but is especially a problem in poor countries for example in Africa it's basically like hunger and there are people from all over the world who are currently deprived of scientific knowledge so why did they create some kind of a commission in the United Nations to address this problem and punish these big companies who make a huge amount of money by restricting access to knowledge if you look at the activities at least a few years ago in the United Nations they were very concerned about information restrictions in dictatorships and etc but censorship is actually a much less important problem because you know they block newspapers, bloggers and we can easily see very low quality information gossip and so on so sometimes it's even useful to block it but in this case they prohibit people from accessing very important and high quality information such as medical journals as far as you know most scientific journals are about medicine and there are many health practitioners who work in Latin America, in Africa and they cannot afford these expensive suspicions this knowledge could potentially help their patients and the point is restricted access to scientific knowledge is not just a matter of progress it's not only about science getting slower but also literally make people die but nobody cares in the United Nations they discuss climate change etc but they do not want to discuss this and fix this problem why that? I had no idea and that was very disappointing to me ok, anyway returning to the award I was very honored to get the same award as Linus Torvitz did that's very motivating and I also hope that other awards will follow in the future ok, thank you for reasons that may be obvious Alexandra couldn't be here for this award tonight again it's my honor to accept it on her behalf and thank you all well thank you Corinne and congratulations again to Alexandra now our next presenter is EFF Senior Staff Technologist Bill Buddington who is a long term activist and this is going to surprise you a cryptography enthusiast Whomst amongst us is the lead developer of Cover Your Tracks and contributed to major projects including HTTPS Everywhere Let's Encrypt and SecureDraw please welcome Bill thank you very much libraries, libraries, libraries according to the American Library Association for many minority and lower income teens schools and libraries serve as a primary source of internet access thank you 63% of teenage internet users go online for more than one location schools and libraries serve as a primary source of internet access for many minority and lower income teens low income adults as well are more likely to rely on public libraries as their sole access to computers and the internet than any other income group overall 44% of people living below the federal poverty line use computers and the internet at their public libraries meanwhile 98.9% of all public libraries offer free public access to the internet all the risks that we associate with our own devices when it comes to digital privacy and security are even more accentuated when we look at the public devices that library patrons don't have full control over how do patrons protect their data if they can't install protective software how do library administrators ensure that harmful spyware is kept off library computers at EFF we create tools that can protect the privacy and security of internet users but who will ensure that these tools are known about by often the at risk library patrons and librarians enter the library freedom project since 2015 they've been pivotal in educating librarians and patrons on the risks of online trackers and data miners which popular services protect users data and which sell users out and the dangers of ill formulated or ill intended bills coming from legislators and most importantly give advice specifically catered to libraries on what they can do to prevent the risks and protect patrons with in person trainings that speak to patrons and librarians not only as people that happen to be in the library but as potential targets of abuse stalking or harassment in their own lives the LFP takes a nuanced approach to the advocacy which is born of a genuine understanding of the heterogeneity of their audience rather than simply regarding them as homogenous subjects of a lesson the humanity with which they approach these sessions is something sorely lacking in the all too often interdisciplinary youth education of low income patrons and not only does the LFP give these trainings they protect the health of the internet privacy and security in other ways as well their landmark initiative to encourage libraries to host Torah anonymity nodes speaks to the core mission of librarians in society in general to act as safeguards for intellectual freedom and self guided exploration of their eyes of authorities and their attempts to stifle behavior and research which they may see as aberrant or threatening and librarians can have greater confidence in the ability to protect their core mission when it comes to technology with the knowledge of the library freedom project has their backs that's why it is my honor and privilege to present this year's EFF award to the library freedom project it is heavy if you if someone comes for your digital rights you can bludgeon them with it that's what we're gonna do we're a library freedom project we're gonna say a few words okay well first of all thank you everybody at EFF we are so honored and touched we have loved you all for very long and you've been a huge part of our journey and our success and it means so much to be getting this award from you all to Bill for that amazing introduction Bill is also my homie we go way back Cory Doctorow not only an amazing emcee but a long time champion both of us and LFP and of libraries in general to our fellow winners the Signal Foundation obviously makers of one of the most important communication tools of our era but something that we use every single day and something that we teach for our library patrons and Alexandra Albakian like obviously if she could be here in some ways it's better that she isn't because we'd be fangirling over her so hard it would be embarrassing we she's an absolute hero and idol to librarians we use Sci Hub all the time it's our libraries that are going broke from Elsevier to all the LFP members on stage with us tonight other members who are watching from home so many friends and colleagues in the audience all the IRL and internet relationships we've made over the years that have supported us and brought us to this point and also to my dad who's here who flew all the way from New Jersey to be here hi dad I knew I was going to start crying when I said hi to my dad do you want to introduce our people while I pull myself together of course LFP is made up of a community of librarians from all over the country and on stage tonight is just a small subset of our people my name is Tess Wilson I'm the deputy director of LFP we have Ray Punn Librarian at the Alder Graduate School of Education Ren Komenos Systems Librarian at the State Library of Oregon Camille Peters Electronic Resources Librarian at the Oakland Public Library Linda Nguyen Services Librarian at the Oakland Public Library Maddie Cropley Teen Outreach Librarian at the Boston Public Library Megan Kinney Librarian at City College of San Francisco Kelly McElroy Outreach Librarian and Associate Professor at Oregon State University Chloe Horsema Teen Librarian with the Sacramento Public Library Howard Besser Meredith at NYU and I'm Allison Macrina founder and director of LFP Library Freedom Project are your friendly neighborhood radical librarians we work at the intersection of information and justice building a future where all can speak and read freely I started LFP nine years ago to help librarians in our local communities learn about technology privacy and surveillance like Bill said libraries are some of our best public resources they serve all members of society without prejudice including many people frankly with nowhere else to go people with low digital literacy or lack of internet access librarians are also motivated by a lot of the same ethical commitments that motivate EFF privacy access and free expression are part of our fundamental core values we support the public's needs in all kinds of ways so I started LFP knowing that libraries were the perfect places to offer critical information and technology resources today LFP has grown into a collective of members from libraries around the country we train library workers to be intellectual freedom advocates in their communities we do this through community convenings an expanding collection of resources and radical continuing education opportunities so some of you may have only recently learned about our work but others may remember us from our early days back in 2015 we made headlines with our effort to bring tour exit relays into libraries the idea was simple libraries provide free high quality internet access to their communities librarians are dedicated to these ideals of privacy and free expression tour is a technology that allows people to freely and privately express themselves online but requires volunteers to dedicate bandwidth to help power the network so it seemed obvious to set up tour relays in libraries and we started with the amazing little Kilton library in New Hampshire we knew going in that this was a provocative project I don't need to tell this audience here that privacy technologies are highly misunderstood politicized however we did not expect the department of homeland security to show up and demand that our relay get turned off but DHS didn't expect us our library community we never heard from them again our library community rallied in support the patrons of Kilton library showed up and EFF had our backs with legal advice, media support they had a huge petition with their enormous network DHS completely back down the tour relay came back online and LFP earned our reputation as rabble rousers we didn't expect a fight even with the feds that experience shaped our next move which was creating library freedom institute an intensive online training program for librarians to become privacy advocates LFI participants learned through close conversations with incredible thinkers in the privacy world we ran LFI eight times and through it built a network of librarians who would become part of the LFP community some of whom are here with us today we were prescient in creating this network because we'd soon find out that we needed them more than ever for years privacy was our main focus but during those years the world changed privacy is still enormously important to us as a component of a democratic society but as we know democracy as a whole has become seriously threatened reactionary forces literal billionaires misinformation and a lack of collective power have undermined an already fragile democratic apparatus in libraries we are now facing an organized movement of anti-democratic, anti-speech actors influenced by insidious propaganda who wish to impose their will on the rest of society through force this shows up in all kinds of ways book banning campaigns attempts at criminalizing librarianship redefining obscenity laws taking over library boards protesting library events and so much more these reactionaries reflect the existence of the library in its current form and will continue taking bricks out of our buildings until we stop them in this environment of extreme hostility LFP has responded by expanding our mission to focus on information democracy information democracy is a term that we coined to refer to the conditions that are necessary for true intellectual freedom we believe that intellectual freedom is achieved when there is equity of access to information when people can seek information without threats of surveillance or coercion and when people are informed about the power dynamics of who controls information against this assault on libraries and democracy LFP is fighting back through community building and education we're running events for librarians around the country to create solidarity and strategize about resisting attacks on our freedom we host an annual LFP camp for our members where we bring people together in nature to connect around we offer numerous trainings for librarians to hone our skills covering issues like privacy for reproductive information seekers collective power against monopolist publishers and vendors especially those that are collecting and selling our data understanding the power of big tech and labor organizing in our libraries we continue to build relationships with amazing people across the civil rights and technology spaces because we're part of a shared struggle in this environment we all need each other and we literally mean you we love to connect about how you can support the LFP community whether it's through helping offer trainings for our members attending our convenings or donating some of the money you got when you sold your crypto come talk to us at the after party your donation is tax deductible this award means so much to us it helps remind us of the power of our extended community and our shared vision for the future it grounds us in the knowledge that we will win together thanks again y'all and we're so ready to party with you well congratulations to the library freedom project who does not love a radical librarian I myself am a recovering library worker and I stand you guys we love libraries at EFF libraries are the last secular place in our world where you are welcome for who you are and not what you got in your wallet library freedom truly embodies the ethic that we embrace at EFF and shows what we can accomplish when we work as a community for our community now our final presenter tonight is EFF's director of engineering for CERTBOT Alexis Hancock Alexis's research is at the intersection of digital rights, encryption and consumer technology she works for an open and equitable web through local tech literacy educating engineers and advocating for better and stronger tech policy please welcome Alexis to the stage I've got lots of follow up on up here okay so I'm Alexis Hancock once again and some of my background entails being a security trainer I was born around 2011 and I didn't really know my place in the fight when it came to Black Lives Matter marches, protests, where was my place I didn't really know and so my place was in technology because I found a few of my friends Facebook live when they were at a protest and I'm like can you not so in 2017 I didn't have many friends on signal advocating for its use and leading by example I use it as my default messaging app at the time for SMS and for secure communications I even managed to get my husband to download it and use it with me and if you knew my husband at all and how frustrated he gets with technology you would know that's a great feat of persuasion signal has displayed solid principles on privacy solid principles on technology and the actual practice to back that up the signal protocol so much so has the signal protocol been able to vamp like be a ramp towards end-to-end encryption implement an application such as WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger and for a brief moment an Android messenger held Google Allo these integrations some rockier than others started to do something particularly special though it is in my opinion signal helped to create a more ubiquitous encryption in our everyday lives specifically end-to-end encryption a standard of encrypted messaging that has been misrepresented as a hindrance to justice and protection of vulnerable people by various governments and law enforcement officials but signal has actually been providing real-time protection for many years people have been surveilled by governments journalists who want to communicate with their sources securely and grassroots activists who want to keep the communities proactively safe when you connect to people you often have to connect to the internet I always say in my security trainings I have conducted there is no tool that exists that makes you a ghost online today's landscape of communication on our devices often leaks information in various ways that can seem futile to many is difficult to not feel like just a number but on signal for a moment in time you can be just a person again talking to your friend about your weekend and nothing much more with that said I am very happy this evening to present the award to the signal foundation thank you so much it's an honor to be here and it's an honor to accept this award on behalf of signal from such a stalwart and long time ally like EFF Ria and I have been involved with the project for almost 10 years we're the longest serving signal employees and we've seen thank you we've seen private mobile messaging shift from a proof of concept to a proven concept we've watched what started with the first 100,000 users rapidly grow into an end to end encrypted service that now regularly handles more than 100,000 requests per second there are revolutionary signal protocol that moxie marlin spike and trevor paren first introduced in 2013 a moment etched in the history of applied cryptography now protects billions and billions of messages every day across some of the most popular apps in the world protecting private communication has never been more important than it is now when commercial surveillance has become a part of almost every aspect of our lives, relationships and livelihoods and although a lot has changed some things never will our goal signal is the same as it always has been to provide an easy to use open source tool that helps people safely and securely share the moments that matter in their lives we're also proud to be a 501C3 nonprofit that is particularly important in an industry defined by commercial surveillance because we don't prioritize profit or growth we can stay focused on what's important and we also avoid any pressure from VCs or boards to whittle away privacy in the name of commercial success our motivations are aligned with everyone who uses signal because we use signal too it's an honor for all of us who work at signal to keep moving forward together with all of you privacy matters but there will always be barriers along the journey the encryption wars of the 90's never really ended nor if you listen to signal's president Meredith Whitaker are they likely to ever end those empower desire information asymmetry in order to shore up that power and that desire doesn't go away this is why we rely on the support of EFF and other organizations who are helping to shape policy advocacy and education and who are pushing back against regulatory encroachments on the right to privacy this all helps us do the work that we do we would like to thank EFF again for this recognition it means so much to everyone on the signal team to be recognized by another non-profit organization in fact the EFF is so committed to being a non-profit organization that the food and drinks are free tonight so cheers to all of you let's make some tiny sandwiches disappear before our disappearing messages vanish too thank you again well fantastic thank you very much let's hear it again for Alexandria Asanova, Elbaki and the library Freedom Project and the Signal Foundation fantastic congratulations to all of our honorees and thank you for the work that you do to make our digital world a brighter better place to connect and act together every year the EFF award honorees show us how our actions make meaningful change in our communities those changes ripple across the web the strength and inspiration to the people who need it the most now you're all welcome to stick around after the ceremony and raise a glass with tonight's honorees and to connect with your fellow attendees people who care as passionately as you do about internet freedom and the open web I want to say thank you again to our EFF award sponsors for supporting tonight's ceremony and thank you to all of you the EFF members around the world our legal work our activism our policy analysis and our free tech development are only possible because of what you do if you support EFF's mission please go to EFF.org celebrate and make a contribution the internet needs you thank you so much for joining us all here tonight I'm Corey Doctorow and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your evening goodnight