* Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag...
We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999.
Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.
Probably the two fastest ways to find out what we do (and how we're funded) is to:
* Read our annual report: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html (our reporting year is from June-July, so this is up to this summer).
* Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag...
We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999.
Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.