 Hello and welcome to the first CFF Awards. My name is Aaron Chu. I am EFF's Director of Member Engagement. Tonight, it's really wonderful to see all of your faces here. We're here to celebrate the movement for digital privacy and free expression. Before we get started, I wanted to say thanks to our sponsors for today. That's Dropbox, Electric Capital, Nostarch Press, Ritter Costa, Johnstone LLP, and Ron Reed, of course. I also want to thank the 33,000 EFF members around the world to make this program and all of our work possible every day. So, thank you to them. Let's give a round of applause to the EFF members, please. So, I've got a couple of notes of house people before we get started, in earnest. Please silence your mobile devices if you have not done so. So, yes. And for those of us watching this online, you're welcome to congratulate our honorees via Twitch chat at eff.org. Actually, if you're in the room and just want to get on Twitch and talk about this event, you can do that right now. And my friend Christian will be in chat keeping all company. So, also if you're an EFF privacy badger and user at our live stream page, make sure to do Twitch chat and permission by shifting slider and view of that page. Thanks for doing your job, privacy badger. So, we take your comfort and safety very seriously. So, you can find a copy of our event guidelines and code of conduct at eff.org and slash events and expectations. If you have questions or any assistance tonight, you can get in touch with one of our designated event monitors. That's Lee Walker. Hello, Lee. Thank you, Lee. Patrick Lee there. And Rebecca Jeske. Hello, Rebecca. Thank you so much. If you need anything, feel free to reach out to them or any of the EFF staff. So, we're in a little mean tech with us. For those of us joining remotely, you can drop a note in chat or send an message to events at eff.org. If you have any questions or need any help. So, this is a very special night for EFF. We haven't gathered like this since 2019. A lot has changed, as we all know, and it's hard to know what's on the horizon. But, honestly, I'm touched to see so many people here in support of digital privacy and for expression purposes. So, thank you so much for being here. That deserves a hug. It does. So, to start off our ceremony, I'd like to introduce Cindy Cohen. Cindy's been our executive director since 2015. Prior to that, she was our legal director. At that time, she was covering everything from computer hacking, devising e-mails, NSA spying, like literally everything in between. It's just a crazy amount of stuff to actually write down and think about. She's received so many outcome accolades, including the Vanguard Award from the Intellectual Property Section of the California State Guard. She's made one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. And she's one of the fourth's top 50 women in tech. Is that not awesome to have people like this on our side? Please give a round of applause to Cindy. I'm proud to be here as the executive director of the Elegant Frontier Foundation. Thank you all for coming out. I'm overjoyed to see your faces in person and also want to warmly welcome the folks who are visiting with us on the live stream. This has been an important celebration of the many victories and heroic moments in the digital rights community for the past 30 years. And you will hear tonight we are lifting up some very special honorees again this year. This year's ceremony, of course, is more special because we're all here in person right now. But we also actually have the best of both worlds. Yeah, that wasn't really able to live stream this event for many years. And now we're doing both. So thank you, COVID. As I said, IFF has gathered people together to recognize the leaders on the electronic frontier for 30 years now. It's a long time. The internet owes an eternal debt of gratitude to the dazzling constellation of past honorees. Some of them are with us here tonight. So thank you for coming back out again. We've honored cryptography pioneers with Divya Velma, Martin Hellman. We honored Spectrum Hopper, Hedy Lamar. We honored our friend technologist and open access applicant, Eric Schwartz. We honored Digital Rights Advocates, Marquette Demesh. Cyberpunk author, William Gibson, Privacy Protecting Heroes, and our friends at the Tor Project. And it was a low on Chelsea Manning just to name a few. We saw some of the pictures from past awards as we were getting ready here. Tonight, we're marking a new phase in these annual celebrations. We started with a pioneer metaphor at a time when the image made a kind of sense for some of the things that were happening online. Regardless of what it might have felt like in the 1990s, it really no longer fits. The internet, thank you, the internet is no longer anything like a new place. The born digital generation is now in its 40s. There's no longer a sharp line between digital rights and well, rights. And if there ever was, and the people who need those rights are much more numerous, much more diverse, and basically kinds of problems that exist in a more mature requirement than we were facing in the 1990s. There's a lot of ways in which that wasn't the best metaphor in our life ago. The digital world is now plainly still a place where we can dream, and develop, and try out new ideas. But it's also a place where we are increasingly surveilled, silenced, and disempowered. And where people of color and those who are already marginalized suffer the most. We just aren't pioneers anymore, friends. We are technology creators and users building a digital nature together and facing down powerful forces of repression, both corporate and governmental. So we knew we needed a refresh, and it raised a couple of questions. First, you know, should we be celebrating the people who help us in advancing the wrong line? Yeah, that's easy. Yes, of course we should have always. But we decided to shift the focus from who people are to what they've done, and to more clearly center and name the benefits that they have given to all the rest of us. So you'll hear that the Chihuahua lawyers was awarded for something, and not merely for being a person. The second thing, you know, should we step back from the problems of our time at all right now? It's a very dull and expressly recognized kind of the blossoms that we see out there in the world. And I think the answer again to that is absolutely. But maybe better recognized that no flower blooms alone. EFF is long awarded, given the award to groups of people. But I think with the EFF awards, it's easier to do that. It doesn't feel like the exception and feels more like the role. So these insights and others are how we arrived at calling this the EFF award celebration, where we celebrate people but also what they do. And where we continue to make space for winners who are not individuals, but instead our communities, organizations and other group efforts. So this year, I'm very happy that our awardees are a lot of El Fatah, who's winning the EFF award for Democratic Reform Advocacy. The Digital Defense Fund, who's winning the EFF award for civil rights technology. And I think it's just going to be the EFF award for right to look out there. And we all support the EFF because we know that our choices will determine whether technology continues to reinforce old world dynamics that trample the powerless, or if tech will support freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. And we're here tonight because we're putting our marker down on the freedom side. Now, if you will indulge me a bit, I do want to brag a bit, talk a bit about some of the work that we've done since last year's Pioneer Awards. First, EFF has long railed against online tracking mechanisms, the predatory industry that has grown up around them and the mass surveillance they have fostered. Recently, we published a new series of deep dives into those farms and released the results of a years-long investigation into a company called Vogue Data Sciences, a company that buys application data from hundreds of millions of U.S. devices and maps that for the police, often without a warrant. The team uncovered at least 18 local, state and federal law enforcement clients. The investigation has yielded a tremendous amount of media coverage and led congressional members to ask the government trade commission to investigate these data handling practices. Your information should be for sale, and cops should be able to use data brokers to sidestep our privacy laws. We also recognized that privacy and security issues that we have long advocated for were going to be given a new urgency when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal protections for reproductive rights. In partnership with groups on the front lines, we went to work adapting our digital security guidelines for people seeking helping or offering abortion services. We pushed companies and policymakers, both in the private and the public sectors, to enact changes to support user safety and privacy. And we celebrated when California heated the calls from a broad network of local rights advocates and passed two bills to protect users of digital services. That fight's not over. None of our fights really are over. But we jumped into the fray and we've seen at least some good changes result. And last but not least, we and many other advocates have continued to work to preserve our speech online under incredibly challenging circumstances. As one of the first founders, John Gilmour said, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. But it's not an automatic process. Threats continue to arise in the form of government actors and law enforcement, poorly written bills with stifled expression and the flow of information on the web. And then there's the inconsistent and sometimes downright terrible content moderation decisions by the giant social media platforms. One of which might be needing a bunch of new folks to try a federated world. We'll see. Protecting our freedom online will always be a work in progress and we're thankful to every one of you for helping us forward. Of course, those are just three examples. I wanted to share with you a little sizzle reel that we just put together. EFFers at the news because I thought you might enjoy taking a peek at it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, also known as EFF, has privacy concerns. There are a lot of ways in which this could go very wrong very quickly. New and unexpected threats. We think that it's a serious invasion of our privacy and civil liberties. We're really concerned about the impacts to First Amendment rights. Targeting of Asian communities throughout Sacramento. The police should not be able to access thousands of private cameras to conduct surveillance in real time. We're concerned that there are risks to human rights and personal safety. Bad things are coming and we're very concerned about that. Because it's not like a normal medical record. Now that Roe vs. Wade is overturned, law enforcement could use a woman's personal data to bring criminal charges if they suspect she's received an illegal abortion. Bagnet searches on locations that provide abortions and then work backwards to figure out who the people are who went to a particular facility during a particular time frame. Our phones track us. Google tracks us. All of that data is collected and it's sitting somewhere. So what rights do Americans have? The federal level. There's an electronic communications privacy act called ECPA. There's the Story Communications Act, which governs emails. There are some protections in place but they are so out of date. They are decades old. They are not what we need for this moment by a long shot. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says any legislation to that effect will meet with resistance from Google and others. What are some actionable steps? We really need privacy law. Restrict location services on the apps they're using or you might just leave your phone off altogether. Now there are things that companies can do. First, they can make sure that the warrant is in fact valid because they're not always valid at all. Secondly, they can decide whether they might want to fight back if there's some legal grounds to do so. Another thing they can do is notify their users unless there's a gag order, which may have happened in this case. But really the first thing they need to do is they need to help their users protect themselves. They need to adopt, for example, end-to-end encryption. If these companies aren't collecting this personally identifiable data that can be exploited, the problem is solved in all of these cases. Privacy should not be an opt-in model or something that users have to advocate for for themselves. It should just be on by default. Each one of us has the power to inspire others in our own ways. That is precisely why we are so proud to celebrate tonight's award winners. Together, we are the community that can and must create a better digital world than the one we have today. And I know we can do it. Thank you. So before we could present this evening's awards, I want to take a moment to honor two members of the EFF family that we lost to cancer this last year. Elliot Harmon and Peter Eckersley. Elliot and Peter were emblematic of the activism and public interest technology work that is so deeply important in the digital rights world, and they were both taken from us way too soon. And we are still mourning them. To share a few insights and memories of Peter and Elliot, please welcome EFF Activism Director Jenny Gephardt and one of our technologist fellows, Jan Sue. Elliot and Peter each affected more positive change in their 40-some years than most people could hope for in twice that time. However, none of those accomplishments were achieved in a bad game. So tonight we're going to recognize some of the amazing things that they brought through our community so that others might be inspired to look up. But activism teams work and EFFs work. We win with words. And in the years since we've lost to this mentor and boss and colleague and friend, those words are still really hard to find. So for the next few minutes, I'm going to pull myself together and I'll try to let Elliot's formidable accomplishments just speak for themselves. First, I want to start with what I think was Elliot's deepest commitment in digital rights, and that was open access to knowledge and culture and scholarly research. He brought this value to everything he did. And one of the first times I got to work with him and regret was on the Stand with Diego campaign. A Colombian student, Diego Gomez, was facing prosecution in jail time simply for sharing an academic article online. Something that in this room of nerds is probably very relatable. And Elliot's work on that campaign ensured that Diego's case became a flash point in the global movement of access. And Elliot's work and EFFs work ultimately contributed to Diego's successful acquittal. He was one of the first huge victories I was present for and got to work on an EFF. And it was such a thrill. Later, Elliot led EFF's activism strategy in our campaign against SESTA-FOSTA. This required explaining tricky and increasingly controversial legal issues around Section 230. This required building coalitions beyond the usual suspects to digital rights groups. It required explaining the stakes to folks who might not have considered and acronyming some numbers important to them in their communities before. And throughout, Elliot masterfully distilled all of the jargon and all of the legal complexities into a peer value that all of us in this room can identify with. How the internet enables the voices to have a voice and the choices that we have to make as a community to ensure that value persists. And finally, in one of the last campaigns that Elliot ran for EFF, his favorite thing I ever got to work with him on, Elliot coordinated EFF's largest ever advocacy effort and possibly the largest ever mobilization of the nonprofit sector in our Save.org campaign. He rallied 871 nonprofits and tens of thousands of individual petition signers around our Save.org campaign. We had everybody from the Girls House Greenpeace like joining in to prevent a private equity firm from purchasing the.org domain. And I will never forget the thrill of like opening my laptop every morning and seeing dozens more campaign sign-ons roll in. And I will also never forget how quickly that thrill turns to trend. How are more people signing up for this? We didn't think this would be this big. Like how are we going to vet all these organizations? Can we vet all these logos on one webpage? How is that going to work? Is it just going to fall forever? This was an all-hands-on-deck moment for the actors and team. I am seeing some faces in the audience who are there in the trenches with Elliot at that time. And Elliot led us towards what was ultimately a victory with his signature compassion and determination and humor and humility. Elliot averaged all of these campaigns not as fights for EFF to win. He did have a habit of winning. But these were to him an opportunity to affect real people's lives through our work. And more than anything else, that has been so great for McKay with me. Familiarious example? Thanks. He said that in the true spirit of Peter Epper's Lady, I procrastinated writing this speech until the last possible minute. And as a result, there were many moments in the course of writing it where I was about to text Peter asking for his thoughts. And it just felt so natural to ask him for advice, knowing that he would listen, think about the problem, and say something perfectly brilliant. Hurts to realize that he's not even with us here tonight after all these years by our side. And we'll never share his wisdom with us, again, depending on the advances in preservation. When I started working on EFF a decade ago, Peter had already been here for years as the head of technology projects. But he soon became more than just my boss. He was a mentor to myself and many others, some of them are not us tonight. Not just in technology, but in the finer details of how to have a rich and fulfilling life. Case in point. One whole bright January morning in 2014, Peter and I were riding the couch train from Mosul to San Francisco. A stranger sat down next to us and learned that we were working on EFF. And then his eyes lit up and he said, oh, that's so cool. But you guys defeated Sofa and Haipa just a few years ago. So you won, right? Peter laughed and he explained that. It's not quite like that. He said, imagine this. You are a hero in a comic book. And every time you defeat your nemesis, a new one appears. This has to happen. It must happen over and over again. And it has to work that way because you live inside a comic book. And indeed in life is the cyberpunk comic book. Peter is a magical wizard who appears in our darkest hour. And with a twinkle in his eye lights the path forward for a step-by-step. He was a visionary and influenced the sense of the word because he saw what needed to be done to save the internet and he just started doing that. Let me give you just one example. In 2010, he noticed that Facebook, our favorite website, supported HTTPS but it wasn't automatically opened. So we made this browser extension for the help of some others called HTTPS everywhere that automates the upgrade. And HTTPS back then was the exception rather than a rule because it cost money to get a TLS over the gap. So he had this impossible vision. What if we partnered with a certificate authority and gave out free certificates that could be automatically deployed and renewed without any kind of user interaction? He thought this would change everything and finally get us to near 100% encryption on the internet. And he turned out to be spectacularly right in the time when few people believed this would work. So the project that came once and forever has now issued TLS certificates to over 300 million websites and most sites not supported HTTPS. We could spend hours here talking about the project that has started with the impact of privacy battery cannot be looked at as a self-server doing so forth. But suffice to say, it's undeniable he changed the face of the internet with the veteran. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank him for all he has done and we'll do our best to kill his life forward. One thing I'll remember so vividly about Elliot and Peter Burke was how they sounded. Each filling the room with a distinctive voice and a booming laugh and a very deliberate way of stringing words together to tell a story and to invite an ally to join the fight. And the fights that Elliot and Peter won for the internet will continue to affect people's lives for the better. And the people who have the privilege of working with them, including so many of us here tonight, we also have the privilege of carrying forward the vision of the freer, more open, more secure, more vibrant internet that they knew was possible. Thank you all. Thank you, Jenny and Yon, for that really wonderful tribute. Peter and Elliot were part of the FF family and so obviously that's important to us. We really needed this moment to sort of talk about them and reflect on them. But the two of them were also dedicated to the digital rights movement and that's the thing that I'll take away from us. So even if you didn't know them personally, I think you should know that our digital world is better off for having had them in it and wherever you guys are, thank you so much. And it's also important to remember that we don't do this work alone. Each of us can contribute to a future that embraces creativity, diverse ideas, and the privacy to explore the one-year-in-terms. Tonight's honor is to exemplify that spirit of digital freedom in extraordinary ways. So to present our first FF award in the evening, I'd like to introduce a long time all-mine rights activist who's a leader in EFF's international work for many years, served as director of strategy for EFF also and is now an EFF special advisor. Please welcome Mr. Danny O'Brien. So now I'm no longer at EFF. I feel that I can reveal some of the secrets that run the organization. I see the lawyer EFF. Yes, okay. I thought you guys would support whistleblowing. Okay. So there are tricks and stories that you probably have reverse engineered from what we do. And the first secret is to always try and personalize the issue, personalize the story. In many ways, what you're seeing here is an exercise in that. But of course there's another side to that, that all stories, all issues are made out of people. People like Peter and Elliot and the other people that I can almost see out there, Dan and Aaron. And most of all for this particular moment, Alar. So Alar was someone who has always been intricately connected not only to the issues, but also to the institution of EFF. He was a big EFF supporter and many of us count him as someone we've met as a friend. Okay, another big secret that I can reveal is that, and actually this isn't, this was something that I sort of reverse engineered myself over there as I was pacing around as I was trying to explain a technique that we use at EFF, which is particularly in the international space, which we notice that people can often see things in black and white in other places. We would often do this thing of pointing out an issue that was happening in another country, say China, we talk about the kind of level of surveillance that was going on in China and people, because China's a long way away and you don't know much about China. So people would see that go, that kind of mass surveillance by a large state institution is appalling in a signable authoritarianism. And then we would sort of pan the camera across to the United States or a little bit closer to the audience that we were talking to and pointed out the connections, the same tools of corporate and state surveillance. And like personification, like personalizing the story, that hit something else, which is of course those things were happening in those places and even though there's a capability to see some things better in long distance, see things far away in more detail in some ways and clearer than close up. Again, something that we've used in the movement of time as well, where we point out a utopia and then or a dystopia and pan back to the present day. Those things are real in a lot of very strong ways. We are walking towards a dystopia or we are walking to a utopia by making those individual's decisions right now and those things are really happening in other places to people who are as real as you and I. In Ella's case, what's interesting is that Ella had that ability and still does to see what was going on at short distance too. For those of you who don't know, Ella was a pivotal figure in the fight against the Mubarak regime in what came to be called the Arab Spring. He was a figure in Tali Square and he was one of the engines that connected those protests to the wider world through his constant blogging, writing and into communication. What makes Ella not unique but I think significant as an illustration of the power of activism if conscientiously and carefully pursued is that Ella went on from that point of view and that moment not to lead a government or to participate in the next stages but to protest those as well. There was a time when we used to joke that Ella was someone who had successfully been imprisoned by not one, a dictator of Egypt but two. And then three and now four. He was one of the first people to protest after the Tahrir protests had deposed Mubarak against the military dictatorship that followed that following one of the worst massacres of Coptic Christians in that country that followed that shift in power Ella was one of the first people to speak out in public against that massacre and against the saviours of the revolution that he had originally participated in. When they in turn were replaced by Islam Brotherhood Ella also protested them following a series of equally terrible crackdowns on civil liberties and human rights in Egypt and when in turn that group was deposed and replaced by another junta Ella was on the front lines protesting the even more devastating arrests and tortures, murders and imprisonments of what is now over 20,000 political prisoners. Ella has been in jail now on and off for most of the last decade. He is currently not only on hunger strike he's been on hunger strike for 220 days. He is now on water strike. He is probably one of the leading figures in the campaign to free himself and all political prisoners in Egypt. In a few days President Biden will be meeting with the Egyptian government and we are told will be lobbying hard for Ella's freedom my own country that Ella is also a dual citizen of is similarly protesting his imprisonment one of the other secrets of EFF is how we choose these awards and we choose these awards very secretly I'm not going to reveal the strange machinations and people's smoke that appears but I will reveal one thing which is we often talk about is this the moment that's because many award winners past and present appear every year we always consider them and so we always ask is this the time is this the moment to pick this year to award the person who represents this issue I would love to say that this is Ella's year because he is free it is Ella's year because he is not free as in the dying moments of a protest and as his sister told the press this week really this is the last hope for his freedom this this is a book that I happily recommend and I'm just going to read from it it's always terrifying when somebody comes and has like five green pieces on it and so I want to just reassure you that we're not going to read the entire chapter of this book but I wanted to read this particular part of it because Alal was an advocate not only for the freedom of the Egyptian people but for all the technology and systems that EFF has fought for and he writes in a letter from prison in 2017 his part it's called a portrait of the activist who died his prison we came of age with the Second Intifada we took our first real steps out into the world as bombs fell on Baghdad all around us fellow Arabs thrived over our dead bodies Northern Arabs chanted not in our name Southern Comrades sang another world as possible we understood then that the world we did heritage was dying and that we were not alone we strove to understand those official statements it was never enough we sought out our predecessors we learned from them and taught them for the most part we refused their legacy but we respected their experiences we understood that information technology was the key to shaping the new world and realised how exposed we were to global monopolies so we adopted free and open source software as a condition for the development of society and achieving independence and as a crucial tool in modernising the Arab world's economy and ending its subjugation we started campaign touring universities student lecturing professors we organised conferences and training programmes technology localisation became our top priority we worked on the Arabisation of terminology translated user interfaces we designed fonts developed software and built websites we connected bloggers across the Arab world and encouraged artists, writers, researchers and translators to share access to their creative outputs and their archives working to support Arab online content it wasn't long before we came up against censorship prosecution accusations of pericy and the imprisonment of the world so we joined ranks with the defenders of freedom of opinion of expression and belief of press freedom and academic freedom we built online networks and political movements we set up IT labs and technology clubs whereas in formal neighbourhoods we built wireless networks to extend the internet to Egypt's countryside and then we were invited to share those experiences in sub-Saharan Africa and so became engaged with networks that were to establish online connectivity as economic, cultural and social rights we engaged with reality we tried to change it influence to anticipate it and shape it we were of course one of the weaker parties present but we were present when the world noticed us and our story started to interest journalists and become materials for research centres we insisted on our own narratives rather than those being imposed upon us so we were not surprised by the revolution we had sought it and we were not surprised that inspired protest movements in Europe and the US did we not protest together against the war on Iraq wasn't that work for change and reform linked to open debates shared struggles and virgin communities together comrades from every continent but then we lost and everything lost its meaning that's not the note to end with Alar Alar would frequently quote in his tweets the old Antonio Gramsci quotation I believe Gramsci was quoting from someone else that we can have a pessimism of the intellect but we need an optimism of the will right now Alar is surviving entirely on that optimism of his will and I urge all of you after this to join with the free Alar movement and help support the freedom of Egyptian political protesters prisoners and Alar our friend one of the business who was most close to Alar during all of this time is Gillian York my colleague at EFF Gillian couldn't be here but she's sent this message to you and to Alar hello good evening to all of you and congratulations to tonight's EFF award winners I truly wish that I could be there with you this evening to celebrate I'm thrilled that my good friend Alab de Fatah is among tonight's EFF award winners although I wish that it could be under different circumstances as you know Alar can't be with us here tonight because he remains in prison in Cairo where he's spent most of the past decade Alar has been on hunger strike now for well over 200 days and by the time this video airs he will have ceased to intake any form of nutrition we had hoped that in his absence one of his family members could be with us here tonight to accept the award but they are understandably fighting for his freedom and for his life I first met Alar in 2008 at a meeting in Budapest and was struck by his outspokenness his shining intellect and the thoughtful way in which he pushed back against some of the research that was being presented there he was critical but not for the sake of being so he genuinely hoped to make the world a better place it is that spirit that the Egyptian government has fought so hard to crush Alar is known globally for his activism and the role that he played in the Egyptian Revolution but he's so much more than that he's a skilled technologist and the founder of one of Egypt's important early blog aggregators he's a talented writer I strongly recommend to everyone that you pick up a copy of his book you have not yet been defeated which continues to inspire me he is most of all a brother, a father and an incredibly good friend our friendship like all of his relationships that the Egyptian government stole from us but in the time that we have had together Alar has taught me so much long before it was common he pushed me to use encryption in our many conversations over OTR off the record messaging and stuck in Cairo traffic back in the day he taught me how to view the complexities in our world to see things differently than I might have otherwise he taught me to be fearless and unabashed in my activism to not be afraid to speak up and to do it with humor whenever possible Ali deserves to be free and it is my hope that this award which he richly deserves will help to secure his freedom to Ali with my everlasting solidarity congratulations and may you soon be free thank you so I didn't want to end on quite the note that perhaps this could end Alar is alive and Alar will be free but I also wanted to make one final connection the chronology that you heard from his book which I agree with Gillian it is an amazing book you should actually buy it one of the things that comes out of that chronology is that Alar is 40 years old so he has a particular generational moment that I think rings true for many of us here but one of the things that is changing our experience from being pioneers to something a little more long term is that this is a possibly a fight that will take many generations I just want to leave you with one more I promise you it's short no one has flashed the 32nd chair to point to thank you to point to what it means to create a generational movement Alar comes from a generation of activists who fought many years for freedom in Egypt and elsewhere and when his father died he spoke at the funeral to what it meant to be in a family of activists his father was a lawyer he would talk to us too about the history of the law and he would talk to us just kids teenagers taking our first steps in protest movements and it was important for him to talk to us even if we weren't going to specialize in law important that we understood how the law was developed and what the law could be like what justice could be like most people came in treatment contact with him whether they were family or defendants the new movements who invited him to talk at their events they all developed a certain sensitivity and understanding of the constitution and the law that allowed them later to form groups, to assist lawyers and to relieve them some of the burdens of their work and to engage with the processes of legislation one of the other secrets of EFF is that it's not just the lawyers for the digital revolution they're people who make connections and make friends and change the world but also EFF inspires people to take careful aim at what they can change in the world and not to lose hope even in the darkest times so I'm very very proud to hand this award from EFF to allow when he's free Thank you very much Danny and certainly I think everyone is so hard to understand so I'd like to introduce our next presenter who is an artist, activist and member of the Hacking Pestling Collective please welcome EFF staff technologist Daley Barnett I'm going to keep this brief I'm here to introduce Digital Defense Fund it's a great honor Digital Defense Fund provides digital security advice for the abortion access movement but I'll let Kate who is going to accept the award on behalf of DDF to go into more detail about that work but regardless I am so glad that we get to give DDF their flowers because it's well it's a bummer obviously that their work is so prescient right now but I guess maybe it's a testament to their intuition and their ability to recognize things that need to be done so thank you and I guess a little bit more insight I've been working at EFF for about three years a little more and if there's one thing that I've learned in that time it's that we at EFF exist in a network we rely on the insights and the efforts of others to do what we have to do and DDF has honestly made our work easier they've made our work better and they've guided us in avoiding would-be mistakes so for that I'm very grateful, thank you they make us better and so the least we can do is to give them this award so thank you DDF thank you so much for my team and for myself I want to foremost also thank the Abortion Access organizations and activists that are out there right now on the ground doing the work they are doing sleepless nights brutal financial scarcity death threats and expanding legal dangers to ensure that the hypothetical right to privacy enshrined by the right to an abortion is a promise kept this award is for them they honestly did teach us how to do this job helped us best how to understand these digital threats and how to protect our collective rights they are and have been and will remain to me and to the rest of my team the guiding star for this work I would love also to thank EFF and all of the other collaborators and co-conspirators and peer movements we owe it to all of our amazing colleagues who work in trans rights sex worker rights and all those folks who made sure that we were in the room together a long time actually before we understood just how connected digital privacy rights and abortion rights really are they are the reason that the very same night that the Dobs decision came down I received about a thousand signal chats and calls reassuring us that we were not in this by ourselves so with that community support over the last five years we've worked with the Abortion Access movement to work on our digital threat models respond to all of these many legislative changes to make the stakes together and learn to become the team that this community needed today we provide a comprehensive suite of completely free technical assistance services including digital security evaluations trainings tech service provider referrals project management community built software support grants and managing movement collaboration spaces for all of the above I'm getting tongue tied in so many things so increasingly with the encouragement of organizations like EFF we are taking on also what I like to call tech platform accountability projects so we ensure that we document what the movement is experiencing in trying to engage and navigate tech companies not believes on patients access to care we then ensure that those experiences get back actually directly to the corporations who hold this control of the digital commons themselves and we get the advocacy or just like y'all who help us do something about it so already unfortunately for the first two months after Rose been overturned we can see how necessary this collaborative work has been together for the years before the fall of row I don't know if you know this I certainly didn't before getting this job that Google searches and text messages have already been used as evidence in abortion prosecutions and now companies like Meta continue to turn over DMs of users in order to help charge them with the crime of seeking an abortion many states are now also directly seeking to outlaw the sharing of abortion information one of the state AG's sent a subpoena to an abortion website for posting a billboard up in their state and even we're sharing abortion information remains hypothetically legal tech companies have reused censored accurate abortion information off their platforms using a lot of the automated systems that were put in place after foster cesta they gladly instead take money from the highest bidder to instead pale anti-abortion medical misinformation and direct users into fake clinic honey traps that harvest and resell their information we today find it's in struggle for the soul of what freedom means and it's very real consequence for our freedoms in the physical world it's through these experiences of abortion seekers and those who support them but we've affirmed the inextricable light rates in extricable link between our bodily autonomy rights and our digital privacy rights we've seen time again that our adversaries will target and road the rights of our digital bodies to criminalize and restrict the autonomy of our physical bodies in this way to all of our freedoms online and offline as Cindy had said and the stakes become ever higher for a feature of all of our work together the only reason I am here right now accepting this award representing an organization that is all at all ready to deal with what we all are facing for the road ahead is because five years ago somebody took a really big chance on us they gave us financial resources and an unbelievable amount of trust to figure out how best to address these problems with that time and that we were only able to fill in the technical and operational security gaps of this movement we were able to build a community and a true sense of that community's belonging in digital space we were able to affirm to the abortion access movement all those it serves that the internet belongs to you too every day I meet people already doing the same digital rights work who also deserve that same opportunity who deserve that same trust and resources and freedom to identify and address the specific digital delivery to all of my peers who do digital security and internet free work for trans rights sex worker rights racial justice organizing labor organizing voting rights immigration rights and so many more spaces to receive the same support that we have been given to take on an unprecedented expansion of authoritarianism and the surveillance state this work has never been more crimping and never more a matter of life and death as we heard unfortunately just a few moments ago with threats that rattle the very foundations of our democracy and we at DDF has also never been more ready to support and ensure the success of other new voices we're eager to offer partnership material support and welcome collaborating technologists and experts to all of our initiatives including our techies for reproductive justice community which actually did launch at this very same day so check that out on our website as all of you you insured that we are not alone we're actually also really really eager to ensure that we're doing the same for all of those who are going to join the work as we heard generations to come so in a time when so much of the work to alleviate suffering and protect human rights feels invisible all of you as the EFF community have given us the gift of knowing we're seen we are able to declare loudly that we will never comply in advance because you have our backs and I hope you'll continue to work with us to ensure that the way more people standing where I'm standing right now because you saw them and help back them up too and in exchange we will continue to do our part we will ensure that this award is promised cap to all of us and our most fundamental human freedoms for myself and my entire team thank you so so much thank you so much and the digital defense fund never been more important or we are her time to be doing the work that you do so thank you so much for being here so I would like to introduce our third she's a longtime consumer technology reporter and she was a longtime consumer technology reporter at the Washington University she just got the journey of spirit she is one of our resident experts on the mechanics of the American state legislation she is EFF Senior Legislative Activist K.A.Sukiyama, please welcome good evening my name is Milly Tam and I am Senior Legislative Activist at EFF it's my honor tonight to introduce Kyle Haines EFF award winner for his right to repair advocacy Kyle has become an evangelist in the U.S. and internationally for the right to repair Cameron called the important role that being able to fix, to tinker with and to choose you trust with your own devices plays in making sure people control their data, their security, their staff and helps the planet in the process. Right to repair is having a moment this year with legislation percolating in the state and federal level this past year movement has notched a series of successes after years and years of work that Kyle has been part of. In Colorado Legislature passed a law to allow wheelchair owners access to parts, software and manuals needed to repair their chairs and with little advocacy there is a right to repair bill for electronic devices on the New York governor's desk right now that Kyle and the repair coalition shepherded through a difficult legislature. It's just one signature away from making history. That wouldn't have happened if Kyle hadn't recognized the importance of the platform where people could share repair information. Since it was founded, yes in a dorm room, I fixed it has helped millions of people take charge of their own devices and then help others do the same. When advocating for change it's hugely important to give people a tangible idea of how an issue affects them personally. Kyle is a master at this because he knows exactly how every day people seek out information on how to fix their stuff and his work to contribute this enormous consumer resource to the world. Kyle has also been working with the organization for about a decade. Right to repair implicates so many parts of BFF's work. Manufacturers claim a lot of repair information such as manuals and even diagnostic codes is copyrighted and try to use that copyright to force buyers to come back to them any time they need to fix their stuff and things are even worse with the proliferation of smart TVs, phones, cars, wheelchairs and so on. The software that makes those things smart is usually locked up in digital rights management software breaking that DRM can be illegal all by itself even if you're just trying to do something that's otherwise fine. That's part of what makes Kyle's work so important and a little bit risky though I think it should have worked ever in by the lawsuit I know some folks who are already waiting even for that day. I first connected with Kyle and I first started as a technology reporter and archive search suggests we first spoke about the iPhone 5 and its proprietary screws in 2012. Since then it's been my privilege to move from interviewing Kyle to learning about how to do the work from him. In many ways he's an ideal policy advocate. I've seen myself have the most astonishing ease between the technical and policy aspects of right to repair issues. He's had countless meetings with legislators, staffers, parliamentarians, regulators and others helping him see the benefits of repair. At the same time he never forgets the center of right to repair work actual people. He excels at helping people tell their own stories and brings more people into the fold such as farmers who are fed up with waiting on John Deere to fix their tractor when their crops are rotting in the fields because they can't harvest them. His work and leadership has helped build a community that includes the public interest research group hacker groups, security researchers and many others. Right to repair is up against some vague enemies but the perseverance of this movement is paying off. Now Kyle would be the first to tell you this is the result of a lot of teamwork he wrote a lovely post on iFixit about receiving this award in which he was eager to spread out the plaudits to those he works with in the repair coalition. That Kyle spent five paragraphs of the seven paragraph blog post calling out the contributions that others should tell you a lot about his personality but also demonstrates why he's such a strong and effective leader within the repair community. So it is my privilege to make sure he gets at least some of the spotlight for himself tonight. Please join me now in applauding Kyle and recognizing his work with the EFS award. Hey, this is pretty cool. I'm thrilled to be here. I feel like very much this is one of those we stand on the shoulders of giants kind of thing. I remember I was in seventh grade sitting in science class reading slash dot because that's what you do and reading a post EFF wrote about the passage of the digital name copyright act and what a catastrophe section 1201 was and I don't know if anyone in this room wrote that post. I have no idea who wrote that. I should go back to Internet Archive and see and I remember actually printing it out I was so pissed off of what it takes to piss off a seventh grader. Kind of knew all along that I would have some kind of role in fighting for digital rights didn't exactly know what that would be so majoring in computer science went to Cal Poly and knew that I wanted to develop the software tools to be able to have an impact on the world somehow but I didn't know what and like two months into this I dropped my laptop on the power plug and it was one of those things where I sort of stood on one foot and the moon was aligned correctly I could get the power to charge says like okay this is fine I can take this apart I can fix this myself. I certainly didn't have the money to buy any laptop started pulling the thing apart and very quickly got stuck and so I did what all of you would do just Google how do I fix this where's the service manual and I knew that the service manual existed because I had seen it at the Apple repair shops but I couldn't find it and I don't know about you but my perspective is if information isn't on the internet it doesn't exist so this is a cognitive dissonance this was very frustrating so mulled my way through the repair and then did some more research and found out that sure enough it had been on the internet and someone sent a DMCA dig down request and so this is where Corinne gets very excited because this is the entry of Kyle into the world of copyright so fantastic so the easy way to get around Apple's copyright on this was just to write my own so we took it apart again took pictures along the way put the manual online and you think about all the things in the world how exciting is the repair manual it's certainly not the thing that you're up late at night excited oh I'm going to go read the repair manual we got like 30,000 hits the first day all the Mac websites picked it up and sort of the rest is history we became well we systematically took apart every product that Apple had wrote repair manuals put them online and Apple was really the first company in history I think that had free open source service manuals online for every product that they made but it was because we did it for them or I think if you're probably Apple's perspective we did it to them and probably a lot of Mac users around the world have taken advantage of that right now we help about 8 million people a month on how to fix things which is really cool but where do you go from there we expanded we kept writing manuals for more and more things but the question is like what is kind of the impact where does this lead the world and where does repair fit into this broader scope of software freedom of hardware autonomy of access to be able to tinker with and fully understand our things because for me fighting for the right to repair is not purely about can I fix the thing that I have can I get myself out of the pickle that I'm in but it's about what does the world of technology look like what do we want the shape of the technosphere to be do we want to have access to all the way to the lowest levels to the top level to really understand and be able to have control of the things in our lives and the fact that we can't fix our things is sort of like the first challenge of a submerged iceberg of the way that freedom has been taken away from us by the technology that was supposed to free us so diving into this farther we realize well let's open up let's see if we can make an open repair manual for everything so we made a wiki we brought the community on board we had thousands of people from around the world contributing now I fix it's up to 80,000 repair guides for about 30,000 devices but we realize very quickly that it was not possible for the community to keep up with the pace that the manufacturers are operating at and I think that that is the same tragedy that we have in the open source software world that I don't care how fast all of us open source software hackers type we can't type as fast as everyone who's being paid to write software and so the amount of like closed software in the world is kind of dwarfing the amount of free software in the world which is a sad thing so how can we work to open up the hardware that is being created by people who are paid to create closed ecosystems we have to change the rules of the game and it was around 2010-2011 I realized that we were going to have to fundamentally shift the laws the rules of the game that all of these companies were playing in because the default was systems are locked down farmers can't fix their things college kids can't fix their laptops and if the introduction of computer chips into ordinary things was the wedge that they were using to lock down repairs repairs are just going to be the beginning and all of the rest of our freedom of what we can do with our hardware was going to be next so it said how can we put a stop this now how can we start how can we stop the beginning of the end of autonomy of all of our things so that was around the time that the US Copyright Office did something kind of stupid and they decided AT&T and Trackphone had gone to them and said hey you know those phones that people are unlocking because you gave them an exemption to be able to unlock phones yeah that's hurting our ability to make money selling prepaid phones at 7-11 would you please stop and the Copyright Office was like yeah okay sure and so the US became the only country in the world as far as I know it was illegal to unlock a cell phone to move it from one cell phone carrier to another and so a lot of folks I think spearheaded by EFF got engaged and got involved and there was a White House petition and I jumped on board and we got the I believe it was the second most signatures of any petition we the people petition that President Obama ran the first by the way the most popular petition was the deport Justin Bieber back to Canada which I think we can all agree would be a good idea also a good idea maybe maybe if we can unlock our phones so President Obama said sure and then and then we banded together was seeing the connoisseur and a whole bunch of folks here and and went to Congress and spent about a year fighting this and I figured before we like tackle the big right to repair fight let's fight something easy that everyone can agree with everyone has phones we picked up more mainstream issue than right to repair we won Obama signed the bill and self unlocking is legal and the Copyright Office has agreed with us ever since that unlocking funds is a good thing yeah so since then every three years we go back to the Copyright Office and we ask for a little bit more and and so one year I was chatting with some folks and we said well what if we apply on behalf of farmers wouldn't it be nice if farmers could jailbreak the tractors or do repairs on the tractors and and so we did this we got a bunch of farmers we actually went to Santa Maria California interviewed a whole bunch of farmers in Spanish and we recorded we recorded the Spanish interviews of them talking about how they couldn't fix the computers in the tractors and then we sent the Copyright Office videos of farmers in Spanish in California talking about how they couldn't fix their tractors it was super cool we also the Copyright Office had this petition form that was incredibly broken opaque that was the public submission form and it was like submit all these different fields and one of them was select the class that you want to comment on class 1 through 27 no human was going to be able to figure out this form so we said that's fine we're technology people we'll make our own form and so we set up a different form on our own website we collected and we got 80,000 signatures or something like that we got people to write individual notes and then we needed a way to submit it to the Copyright Office so we just wrote a script that went to the Copyright Office website one by one submitted the forms so we got a call from the Copyright Office and they said please stop your script what we didn't know is that this form was actually a pearl script that took the contents of the form submission stuffed it into a Word document attached it to an email and emailed it to the Copyright Office Copyright Office we took down the Library of Congress's email server so like please stop DOSing us you can just give us an Excel file we're like sure here you go so these are the things that you learn along the way of digital activism so we have successfully within the Copyright Office's framework we've managed to expand significantly every three years we asked for more repair rights this last go round we got to repair just about everything there's a few things that we don't have yet we got a lot of things the catch is you have to wiggle your own tool to fix the thing I can't sell you the tool nobody can sell you the tool you can't go on on eBay and buy the tool you have to wiggle your own tool so we're working on a federal bill to fix that we are also at the state level working on legislation that says hey if you're going to sell a complex electronic product you have to make parts tools and information available we've been waging that battle for ten years we've had bills introduced in 44 different states this year over 25 states including California introduced bills and we lost and 22 of those states but we won in Colorado our first one ever and we are so close in New York it's ridiculous we managed to pass almost unanimously New York senate and the house despite having ten trillion dollars of market cap registered to lobby against our bill and this is the fear and this is why this is so important that we capture this moment is I am afraid like what happens when there's a hundred trillion dollars of market cap on the other side like how much money is so much that we will never have these freedoms again if we don't capture this moment in time if we don't get this done now we will run out of this opportunity and we will we will be trapped in the world where we have manufactured control where none of us have autonomy over our devices so that's what I am incredibly honored and appreciative we are so close Governor Hochel could sign this tomorrow and we could have the first worldwide right to remember we are so close and absolutely couldn't have done it without all of you in our incredible community so very very grateful thank you very much this is an absolute line questions to all of our honorees tonight a lot DDF, Kyle you know I love how diverse get important all three of our honorees are this year I think it's really really cool everyone is doing something that is so deeply important in touching to digital rights for people around the world and they're all so different I just think that's awesome thank you so thank you guys so much so all of you really again you're an inspiration in the fight for a brighter future especially in times of darkness and you know that's a responsibility that all of us share and I'm just saying all of you sending the stage for the next generation of digital rights supporters in the world and you know this community thanks you thank you so much another round of applause so now before we go tonight I also want to one more time thank our event sponsors Dropbox, Electric Capital, No-Star Chimp Press Ritter, Costa, Johnstone, LOP and Long Green of course thanks to the EFF members who support our work and make all of this possible at www.dynamictechnologists.org and for those in the room I invite you to stay for refreshments and catch up with some of the dynamic technologists activists, lawyers and just a bunch of cool people in the room please stick around and for those of you joining through cyberspace thank you very much and we'll see you next time thank you goodnight