I Thought You Guys Were Supposed To Be Utopian: The EFF at Etech

(A guest blog by Danny O'Brien, the EFF's cultural ambassador)

As one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's outreach folk, I have to concede that our message is not often about cyber-unicorns and crypto-ponies. We're often warning companies and hackers about what we see as upcoming threats to their rights, and urging them to take action. To give some examples: one year, I gave a Emerging Tech talk called "The Wheel of Plaintiffs", in which we span a giant Flash wheel to see who we thought in the audience might get sued next, and by whom. Another year, I heard a hacker come out of our software patent tutorial muttering "Man, that was the most depressing talk I've ever heard". I'm sure that if there was a box in the O'Reilly audience feedback forms that said "Speaker Made Me Reconsider Landscape Gardening As A Career", we'd have never been invited back.

Anyway, to buck that trend, we called year's EFF panel on Wednesday "On a Brighter Note...": and we promise to be happy.

Despite our frequent flagging of upcoming dangerous waters, the truth is that all of EFF's staff are incredibly optimistic about the future - of technology, and of the civil liberties and virtues that it enables. We're going to take "A Brighter Note..." as a chance for EFF and the audience to paint a picture of the future that shows about why we fight and why we innovate: how to see open systems and smart new technologies as enabling privacy and free speech; what legal victories we see on the horizon, and underappreciated tech areas to explore, for new business and new ways to empower citizens.

Some of the areas we'll be covering include blue-sky ideas for reclaiming the patent system; how social networking (and distributed computing) might shift when privacy becomes a market value; what we're seeing with the latest technological changes in improving policy-making both in the US and elsewhere; and what happens when the long-forgotten Internet edge re-joins the Internet cloud.

On the panel, we'll have some inveterate EFF optimists in both tech and law: Cindy Cohn, who successfully argued in court that "code is speech" and saved strong cryptography for the global net, Emily Berger, our IP fellow and who currently heads our Patent-Busting Project, which works to reject dangerously broad patents, one challenge at time, and Tim Jones - who cut his teeth running the tech behind the Howard Dean campaign, and now EFF's technical director. (Kevin Bankston, the lawyer behind our lawsuit against AT&T, has sadly been sucked back into the Washington vortex to argue against retroactive immunity for telecom companies, but expect many audience figures from EFF's past as official Optimistic Hecklers.)

We're usually in a good mood anyway at Emerging Tech - O'Reilly graciously hosts the Pioneer Awards fundraiser at the conference, which is always a cheery blast of optimism even in the darkest times. Tonight, we'll be thanking Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla project, Michael Geist who fought off Canada's DMCA, and Mark Klein, the engineer who blew the whistle on AT&T's warrantless wiretapping program. (I am firmly assured there is no conspiracy behind the fact that the end of the EFF Awards clashes slightly with the Disney Party - and would like to categorically deny that we have been lobbying for a term extension of our party for another fifty hours plus life.) See you there!