EFF and Gilmore: Secret Spat Results in Break Up and Divorce

[grarpamp]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/john-gilmore-leaves-eff-board-becomes-board-member-emeritus

76-year-old John Gilmore co-founded the EFF in 1990, and in the 31
years since he's "provided leadership and guidance on many of the most
important digital rights issues we advocate for today," the EFF said
in a statement Friday.

"But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best
communicate and work together," they add, announcing "we have been
unable to agree on a way forward with Gilmore in a governance role."
That is why the EFF Board of Directors has recently made the difficult
decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board.

We are deeply grateful for the many years Gilmore gave to EFF as a
leader and advocate, and the Board has elected him to the role of
Board Member Emeritus moving forward. "I am so proud of the impact
that EFF has had in retaining and expanding individual rights and
freedoms as the world has adapted to major technological changes,"
Gilmore said. "My departure will leave a strong board and an even
stronger staff who care deeply about these issues."

John Gilmore co-founded EFF in 1990 alongside John Perry Barlow, Steve
Wozniak and Mitch Kapor, and provided significant financial support
critical to the organization's survival and growth over many years.
Since then, Gilmore has worked closely with EFF's staff, board, and
lawyers on privacy, free speech, security, encryption, and more. In
the 1990s, Gilmore found the government documents that confirmed the
First Amendment problem with the government's export controls over
encryption, and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v DOJ, which
resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech
protected by the First Amendment and the government's regulations
preventing its publication were unconstitutional. The decision made it
legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites, and software like PGP and
Signal to use the encryption of their choice.

Gilmore also led EFF's effort to design and build the DES Cracker,
which was regarded as a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate
computer security and the public policies that control its use. At the
time, the 1970s Data Encryption Standard (DES) was embedded in ATM
machines and banking networks, as well as in popular software around
the world. U.S. government officials proclaimed that DES was secure,
while secretly being able to wiretap it themselves. The EFF DES
Cracker publicly showed that DES was in fact so weak that it could be
broken in one week with an investment of less than $350,000. This
catalyzed the international creation and adoption of the much stronger
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), now widely used to secure
information worldwide....

EFF has always valued and appreciated Gilmore's opinions, even when we
disagree. It is no overstatement to say that EFF would not exist
without him. We look forward to continuing to benefit from his
institutional knowledge and guidance in his new role of Board Member
Emeritus.
Gilmore also created the alt* hierarchy on Usenet, co-founded the
Cypherpunks mailing list, and was one of the founders of Cygnus
Solutions (according to his page on Wikipedia).

He's also apparently Slashdot user #35,813 (though he hasn't posted a
comment since 2004).